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Not lazy; new stuff for you coming soon!

balthisar.com is a labour of love. Love of learning, love of creating, love of doing things, that is. Sure, there are some unobtrusive Google ads to the right (big screens) or bottom (small screens), but I only get a hundred dollar check every year or two from Google AdSense. I’ve got a good career, and I’m not in this for the money.

I took a small break from working on Balthisar Tidy to clean up the website a little bit. And as so often happens, one fix led to another fix which led to another fix. And so instead of fixing Tidy’s UTF16 encoding error (thank you, Jon Stovell for reporting it) I’ve been doing things like learning how to implement CakePHP unit tests, optimizing cruddy SASS/CSS before it got too out of hand, and learning how to convert CakePHP classes into full-blown plugins.

As a result I’ve not updated Tidy (but I promise to!), and instead I will soon present you with a whole slew of solutions for problems that I faced when bettering the website. Just to pique your interest, in the next few weeks you should expect to learn about and download all of the following:

  • A multiple-page static document plugin for CakePHP with built-in support for page navigation, tables of contents, multiple levels of hierarchy, and more. No database is required, which is consistent with my philosophy for non-ephemeral documents.
  • A WordPress integration plugin for CakePHP that offers all kinds of nifty features. Its focus is on delivering WordPress content in your own CakePHP website. This means there’s no repetition of WordPress’ backend features and functions. You don’t even have to have WordPress installed on your box; as long as you have access to its database you can integrate nearly everything important into your CakePHP application (note: WordPress comments aren’t deemed important for all sorts of reasons; more on that when I release).

Oh, and it offers several features beyond WordPress, without any modifications to your WordPress installation required.

  • Markdown (actually, MarkdownExtra) support. This article is written in Markdown! (edit 2014-July: Although it’s no longer served by CakePHP.)
  • Syntax highlighting using GeSHi. The options are limited, but it’s a solid solution and "good enough" for ephemeral documents.
  • I’ve also updated an old CakePHP routing class originally written by Jose Gonzalez (support@savant.be) that allows root-level /:page routes. If you count on a lot of static documents for your CakePHP website, I’m certain that it will prove useful.
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