Two announcements today, first thanks to the hard work of my co-maintainers Matthew Peveler and Robert Lord, and many members of the Slate community, we are happy to present Slate v2.7.0.
Secondly, we have something we'd like lots of feedback on.
The Slate v3 technology preview (in the v3-tp0 branch) is a ground-up reworking of Slate using pure Node.js and the eleventy static-site-generator.
The Slate v3 technology preview uses the exact same CSS and client-side JavaScript (apart from a couple of compatibility tweaks) as Ruby Slate, so the output HTML should function exactly as in Ruby Slate.
Ports of Slate including to Node.js are nothing new and indeed my own Shins project has been tracking releases of Ruby Slate since late 2016, however, this technology preview is not based on Shins or any of the other outdated ports, and leverages eleventy to minimise the amount of custom code and dependencies required to build your documentation with Slate.
| Project | Top-Level Deps | Bundled JS Deps | Docker Image Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slate 2.7 | 8 | 5 | 482MB |
| Slate 3-tp0 | 9 | 2 | 176MB |
| Shins | 18 | 5 | 177MB |
The fact that three of our core client-side JS libraries can be included in the Node.js package.json dependencies makes the process of keeping them up to date much simpler. It also paves the way to potentially move the lunr search index generation to the server side, which would allow multi-page searches.
The Future
It is important to be clear what the function of the technology preview is. It is primarily focused on getting feedback from the community.
- We are not saying that Slate 2.7.0 will be the last release of Ruby Slate
- We are not saying that the next major version of Slate will be Node.js-based
- We are not saying that the next major version of Slate will be
eleventy-based
We are saying that we recognise that the Ruby and middleman infrastructure used by Slate has historically caused the community, and maintainers, a good deal of headaches over the years.
We particularly want to hear your experiences of using the technology preview in these areas:
- Compatibility with Ruby Slate
- Any bugs found in building or the resultant HTML
- Operating system compatibility, particularly on Windows
- Should we symlink JS dependencies as now, or simply copy them?
- Should we mirror the Ruby Slate
sourcedirectory structure or have a clean break? - Ease of use
- Speed
In addition to the concrete areas above, we would welcome feedback on the adoption of eleventy itself; we note that the project is relatively young (circa two and a half years) and has not yet reached the milestone of a stable v1.0.0 release. Also, eleventy has a fair number of open issues and this is with it using the lodash style of issue management where enhancement requests and documentation change issues are closed, but still monitored. eleventy while not being one of the most well-known static site generators, is actively maintained and it fits the requirements of supporting markdown and ejs templates while not including large unnecessary dependencies such as React or Vue.js, or being primarily focused on being a blog framework. We believe the Slate community could be beneficial to the eleventy community in terms of visibility and additional contributors. eleventy also has a well thought-out plugin system.
We know that the provided documentation is very bare-bones at the moment, but we would plan to copy over the remainder of the README and start the process of updating the Wiki if the technology preview warrants moving to the next phase.
One more thing to make clear, we are accepting Pull-Requests against the technology-preview branch, but these should be bug fixes and documentation improvements rather than new features at this stage.
Many thanks for reading, and we look forward to your feedback.
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