0.1.4 and 0.1.5 — configuration instead of code

The morning brought two releases that would take up one line of small print in a client presentation, and without which the whole idea does not hold together.

10:47 — header and footer navigation moved into the configuration file. Before that the menu was an array inside the layout component. It worked flawlessly right up until a second instance appeared with different pages. That is the moment “works flawlessly” turns into “ah, right”.

10:58 — 0.1.5. A series got its own tagline. The `lang` attribute in the HTML stopped being hard-coded and started coming from configuration — because the engine has no reason to assume that every instance publishes in Polish, even if both of them happen to. The offline page also stopped being a file and became a template.

These are the releases nobody writes about on LinkedIn. “I moved an array from one file to another” does not sound like an achievement. And yet the line between an engine and a site that happens to have a lot of files runs exactly here: can you build a second instance without touching the code.

At 10:58 the answer was: almost.