Typemill V2: Meta and more

The past development step took more than six weeks, but it was worth it: With the meta tabs, another milestone is ready and the frontend page is now also visible again in its old beauty and functionality.

The Frontend Page

It is a very special moment when the familiar frontend page is finally visible on the screen again and Typemill is once more doing what it is supposed to do: Publish a website.

The road to this point took more than a year and it is easy to forget how many features Typemill has accumulated: The restrictions on accessing content pages, the permission to download files, all of that had to be redeveloped in parts or at least adapted. Fortunately, many things fell into place, so that in the end the code has become much clearer and leaner. This applies not least to the meta tabs, which caused headaches from time to time in version 1.

The Meta-Tabs

Visually, there has been little change to the meta tabs apart from the design refresh. In the background, however, there have been many improvements. Especially the complex tasks in the administration of meta data could be organised much better in the code.

Along with the meta data, the plug-in system was also roughly adapted to version 2, as adding new meta tabs is a core element of many plug-ins. The adaptations are not quite finished yet, but the foundation has been laid so that after the release of Typemill 2, the existing plugins can also be reworked.

The last development step was also so lengthy because you always come across other code, which you continue to improve iteratively. For example, I have further decoupled and modularised the Visual Editor so that complex plug-ins such as the Math plugin can remain completely independent of the core code in future.

The Next Steps

Time is running out, but luckily there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The next step will include some general clean-up work. Then the last big blocks will be tackled: The media library, the blog feature and also the password recovery should take some more work. After that, there will be medium-sized tasks such as the sitemap, captcha handling, the proxy feature and the security log. The first test version should be released by the end of August.

See you in July for the next update!

PS: You can also read and share this news on the Typemill website at https://typemill.net/news/typemill-v2-metadata and the current code of version 2 is published on github in the tm2-dev-branch https://github.com/typemill/typemill/tree/tm2-dev