An integrated diff viewer for Pier is long overdue. The latest development version of Pier has a first implementation with a simple GUI. The implementation is not perfect, but it already starts to be quite useful for the engineering course here at the university.
I submitted a simple extension of the SUnit Test Runner to the Pharo Inbox. It accurately determines the test coverage of a selected package. For the latest versions of Magritte and Pier I get the following results:
Over the past years several people have asked for a simple solution to export and import a Pier site into a different image. Finally this is possible. The following screen-cast demonstrates the basic steps how I export my complete website and import it into a fresh Pier image.
Pier 1.1 is out and available as a Pharo based one-click image, on SqueakMap and Package Universe. It comes with a bunch of bug-fixes and some new features that make the creation of dynamic web sites even simpler. A quick migration guide was posted as well.
Coderspiel mentions Seaside in the article The right tool for the slob:
We finally put the new web site of Seaside online. The official announcement:
Having a Wiki syntax in Pier makes it very efficient to author and edit content. The Pier Wiki syntax is backward compatible to the syntax of the Squeak Wiki, however it has evolved mostly unnoticed in the past few years. To change that and to make it easier for you to write content I published a Javascript powered edit toolbar:
Early versions of Pier included the syntax to embed Smalltalk code into a page. This was a nice feature for power users, but caused certain confusion among others. Moreover it also caused potential security issues, when the permissions weren't setup properly. Never the less, as there were some people complaining about the missing feature, I am going to show how to extend Pier and its pluggable parser to support this functionality.
The latest version of Pier introduces a new Wiki parser: The previous parser was built using SmaCC and it dates back to the very early versions of SmallWiki. The new parser is hand-written. This might look like a big step back, however there were several compelling reasons not to use an EBNF based parser anymore:
I have been visiting Stéphane Ducasse at the University Savoie in Annecy, France. A few minutes before we left for the Seaside presentation in Geneva, I had the chance to have a look at the presentation of some student projects. The most interesting project built a powerful query engine for Pier working hand-in-hand with the meta descriptions available through Magritte. The tool they present is very similar to what you have in the search of Apple Finder or the way you specify smart playlists in iTunes.