OdHac



Published on May 8, 2013 under the tag My report of the Hackathon in OdessaPublished on May 8, 2013 under the tag haskell

Introduction

So, last thursday I escaped Belgium for a bit and travelled to Odessa to attend OdHac, a Haskell Hackathon organised there by Roman and hosted by Provectus IT.

Odessa is a really sweet city. One thing I noticed is that while some of the buildings seem to be in a deplorable condition from the outside, they actually turn out to be very nice once you’re indoors! This was for example the case for the hostel I was staying in. The contrast is also seen elsewhere in the city, with brand new apartments next to ramshackle, desolated houses.

Picture by Simon Meier

This is, however, not the case for the very centre of the city – around the famous Potemkin Stairs. This neighbourhood is absolutely amazing.

Picture by some random Ukranian guy

Hakyll at OdHac

At the Hackathon, I did a small presentation about Hakyll on friday, and some awesome people decided to help me improve Hakyll a bit this weekend. We were able to implement some exciting features.

Working on Hakyll, picture by Roman Cheplyaka

If-else conditionals in templates

We added some functionality to the Hakyll templates which you allows you to check if a certain value is defined. We chose to use the same syntax as Pandoc, to further ease integration:

<h1>$title$</h1> $if(author)$ <em>by $author$</em> $endif$

We also support if-else-endif. On the plane back, I also took the time to implement $foreach$ and $partial$ .

Teasers

Teasers allow you to write a short introduction for a blogpost, and make it easy to reproduce this introduction on another page together with a “Read more” link. We decided to implement the convention used in Wordpress, which means you define your teasers using the following simple format:

--- title: Some post --- This is the introduction. <!--more--> The rest of the post...

Pagination

We also started to work on a generic Pagination module. It’s not finished yet but it should be possible to clean this up and package it by the end of the week. I’m quite excited about this feature because lots of people have requested it in the past.

Additionally, we did some performance improvements and fixed a bug or two. All in all, a very productive and fun Hackathon! I hope to package up all these changes and push them to Hackage soon.

Thanks for contributing to Hakyll, Alexey Smirnov, Anton Dubovik, Dmitriy Shamatrin, Ivan Veselov and Pavel Poukh! And, of course, thanks for organizing, Roman!