Oh, I almost forgot that we’ve published the first version of HAM a year ago! Happy anniversary!
For those who are unaware of: HAM is our Jekyll theme for static wiki sites and just that. We are actually afraid that Halfmoon, the CSS framework we used to build HAM, are quite unmaintained for a few years.
But the stability of the framework has led us confident enough to continue investing in Halfmoon and HAM. And that’s why we’re excited to introduce HAM version 0.2.0, despite still being alpha.
Wait, wasn’t 0.2.0 released in February? Well, we didn’t announce them officially (and HAM still currently have no dedicated blog page and social media accounts).
We have brought improvements to the web-based comments plugin (now supporting Gisqus, Utteranc.es, and Telegram), upgraded the included Bootstrap Icons library, standardize our system font stack and more.
And stay tuned as we are improving the search experience in HAM.
HAM in Production.
But really, we don’t abandon HAM. We’re using the same homegrown framework over and over again on our internal projects, including my own personal thesis. That huge number on RubyGems downloads, though, are partly contributed by our automated commits and GitHub Actions. And well, if you remember the day we celebrated over 1,000 contributions in GitHub, it has now grown significantly to the point that I’m eligible to become a cyborg developer.
Upcoming Features
So here’s some features we planned along the way to make HAM even better at things. But we still can’t guarantee when these features will be ready to be shipped.
👍 Random and recommended posts.
Our new Random Posts component, introduced in 0.2.2, allows you to generate three random articles, and that’s it. But we are still thinking to change it.
We are actually preparing for Nix so she can suggest new translation ideas for tldr-pages project.
⌨️ More keyboard shortcuts.
Yes, I know, Halfmoon already comes with a group of useful keyboard shortcuts, but we’d like to implement more. For example, Ctrl + / to search for things and Ctrl + S to view the original source.
⚙️ Dedicated Settings page.
A dedicated Settings page. Hmmm, it’s new. You can manage things like themes, search, privacy, and more.
👋 Move on from classic GitHub Pages.
One of our goals for HAM is to make it compatible with the now-classic GitHub Pages experience. That is, with an older version of Jekyll and limited plugin support.
With GitHub now supporting GitHub Pages deployment via GitHub Actions (basically similar to what GitLab did years before), we can take advantage of additional plugins which can be utilized to further improve HAM.
In January 2023 (version 0.3.0 and up) we will eventually remove support for the “classic” GitHub Pages workflow in favor for Actions and Gem-based themes. By removing this old method, we could introduce new features like:
🌐 Better Multi-Language Support.
Well, did you see something annoying here? Since there are many documents which are bearing the same name (albeit with different languages), it becomes more difficult to search for shorter commands such as cd.
Nix has provided some valuable feedbacks for our multi-language support for HAM, which finally lets you host multiple languages under the same Git repo. We should start first on optimizing Search and Nix before bringing other features like localizations to our user interface.
Who knows, we can finally host mirrors of large-scale wikis (like the MDN) to HAM?
💧 Initial Forem-like Liquid Tag support.
But wait, couldn’t we just backport everything Forem have offered to HAM? Well, no, because Forem is licensed under a different one (AGPL 3.0+) than us (MIT/X11/Expat). Not to mention some Forem-specific modules that we definitely would not include in HAM.
So we have to reimplement everything from scratch. But don’t worry, these new tags will be more optimized for HAM (such as layouts and styling), and we can’t wait to implement them here.
🚀 Support for Eleventy and Hugo.
That said, supporting for Eleventy and Hugo could be a huge challenge, as we currently don’t take feature parity too seriously.
At the end…
We’d also like to thank you to the first two GitHub users who starred our repository. I didn’t notice it until today, when writing this news. And if you found this framework useful for your project, please consider donating through GitHub Sponsors and five other ways.
And we’ve included HAM into our Product Hunt!
And the best part, you can now follow HAM at @[email protected] – at least in the Fediverse right now. If you have joined Mastodon or Pleroma or others – you know the drill.
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