nanoc turned one year a few weeks ago. I completely missed its birthday, so happy belated birthday to you, nanoc.
In the past 12 months, nanoc has grown from a hacky little script to a full-grown, powerful and flexible Ruby application. Quite a few people are using nanoc now, as proven by the small but growing community of active users out there (hi!).
So, what are the next steps?
There have been two distinct moments where I thought: “okay, nanoc is complete now, and there is nothing I can improve.” Ah, I was so wrong. There are so many ways nanoc can be enhanced. I’m only limited by the time I have!
Here are some features and ideas I’ve been working on lately:
Including more plugins. nanoc is quite bare-bones. There are some really cool plugins floating around, but few people know about them. Bundling all the cool stuff in the standard nanoc distribution would make sense.
Asset management. A question that regularly pops up is how to manage assets such as images and stylesheets. The answer is an embarrassing “nanoc can’t, so do it yourself.” This’ll change soon, as nanoc will get asset management.
A clean API. nanoc has been too much of a black box, so I’m opening it up. This’ll make it possible to tell nanoc to generate pages for each of your tags, for example.
This stuff will all be in nanoc 2.1, which, because it’s going to be a big release, will take a while before it’s complete. It’ll be worth the wait, though.
So, I definitely didn’t get bored working on nanoc (but I should probably quit working on it for now—exams are coming up).
Exciting times for nanoc indeed!