Announcing BSSG 0.15.0: Performance Boosts, Smarter Builds, and Homepage Customization
Exciting news! BSSG version 0.15.0 has been officially released and tagged! This update delivers significant performance enhancements, smarter rebuilding logic, greater homepage flexibility, and several useful improvements contributed by the community.
Key Highlights in 0.15.0
This release focuses on speed, efficiency, and providing more control over your site's appearance:
1. Major Performance Improvements & Smarter Rebuilds
Get ready for faster builds! This release incorporates a significant performance boost, thanks in large part to a partial rewrite of the caching and index generation logic. Now, BSSG intelligently detects changes and only regenerates modified tag and archive pages, rather than rebuilding all of them every time. This drastically reduces rebuild times, especially for sites with many posts and tags.
2. Customizable Homepage via pages/index.md
Gain full control over your site's front page! You can now create a custom homepage by adding a file named index.md inside your pages directory. If this file exists and has the slug "index", BSSG will use its content as the site's homepage, completely skipping the default "Latest Posts" listing. This allows for truly unique landing pages. (Based on a patch by Tom).
3. HTML Rendering for Post Excerpts
Enhance the look of your list pages! When a post doesn't have an explicit description set in its frontmatter, the automatically generated excerpt (taken from the post's beginning) is now rendered as text on index, tag, and archive pages, instead of appearing as raw Markdown.
4. Conditional "Tags" Menu Generation
Keep your navigation clean and relevant. The global "Tags" list page and its corresponding menu item in the site header will no longer be generated if no posts on your site actually use tags. This provides a cleaner experience for sites that don't utilize the tagging feature. (Based on a patch by Tom).
5. Bug Fixes and Under-the-Hood Improvements
As always, this release includes numerous smaller bug fixes and enhancements identified since the last version, further improving the stability and reliability of BSSG.
Important Update Notes
Given the significant changes to the caching and index generation systems, performing a clean rebuild after updating is highly recommended to ensure everything functions correctly and you benefit fully from the performance improvements:
./bssg.sh build --clean-output
Get the Update!
I'm particularly excited about the speed improvements in this release and the new customization options. Update to BSSG 0.15.0 today to take advantage of these enhancements!
Happy building!
Stefano