Today I’m releasing Serum v1.3.0, which hopefully will be the last minor update before Serum v2. This version includes minor bug fixes, new features, and enhancements to command line user experience.

Fixed

• Fixes an issue which ignored custom template settings for blog posts.

Improved

• Serum now displays relative paths from the current working directory, instead of absolute paths, whenever possible.

• Support for nested includes has been added. Now users can use the include/1 macro inside their includes. Self-including or circular includes are intentionally not supported and these will result in errors.

• Serum provides more options for the length of preview text for each blog post.

  • preview_length: {:chars, 200} tells Serum to take the first 200 characters from a blog post to generate a preview text. The next two options should be self-explanatory now.

  • preview_length: {:words, 20}

  • preview_length: {:paragraphs, 1} (Serches for <p> tags.)

  • Of course, you can still use the old value: preview_length: 200.

• Serum no longer emits ANSI escape sequences by default when the output is not a terminal. (i.e. when the output is written to a file, or when the output is piped to another program.)

  Run any Serum Mix tasks with --color or --no-color option to override this behavior.

Added

• Users can now pass an arbitrary argument to a Serum plugin.

  The accepted value of plugin argument is defined by the plugin author, and this can be used to configure how the plugin should work.

• This update introduces a new render/2 template helper.

  The render/2 helper works like the existing include/1 helper. However, unlike include/1, this helper dynamically renders the given include when the calling template/include is being rendered.

Changed

• BREAKING CHANGES for plugin authors: The following plugin callbacks now accept one more argument: args.

  • build_started/3
  • reading_pages/2
  • reading_posts/2
  • reading_templates/2
  • processing_page/2
  • processing_post/2
  • processing_template/2
  • processed_page/2
  • processed_post/2
  • processed_template/2
  • processed_list/2
  • processed_pages/2
  • processed_posts/2
  • rendering_fragment/3
  • rendered_fragment/2
  • rendered_page/2
  • wrote_file/2
  • build_succeeded/3
  • build_failed/4
  • finalizing/3

  Please update your plugins by implementing the new callbacks above. Existing callbacks will still be supported, but they will be removed in later releases.