I’m starting this section on the Mephisto site to talk about breaking changes as I develop. There are certain things (regarding the liquid templates especially) that are rapidly changing. The first big change is the loss of the sections variable.

Until now, you could use {% for section in sections.list %} to enumerate through the sections. I’ve started converting everything to Liquid Drops and decided to create a ‘site’ drop instead. Change the above to {% for section in site.sections %}. There are a few odd cases that I’ve added:

* {% for section in site.blog_sections %} lists only blog sections.
* {% for section in site.page_sections %} lists only paged sections.

(Each article is a liquid drop too and now has the same methods)

If you want to do something else like, list all but home sections, this is how we’re doing it now:

{% for section in site.sections %}
{% if section.path != ‘home’ %}

{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

I’m still experimenting and looking for the best option. Let me know if you have suggestions.

What is a Liquid Drop?

Here’s a quick Liquid Drop crash course. By default, it lets you set up variables used in the templates as hashes. When you do {{ article.title }}, it converts that to article[‘title’] basically. Sometimes though, you don’t want to preload everything. If selecting an article always selected the http://www.koopa.com/ comments and sections every time, the site could get pretty slow.

So, here come Liquid Drops. They are basically a blank slate liquid variable. It can wrap around a liquid variable’s existing keys, and provide custom methods that load data. Something like {{ site.sections }} will now load all the sections the first time they’re accessed.

This gives us the possibility of performing some custom operations in the future, like {{ site.find_section(‘foo’).articles }}. This also lets someone make a Flickr plugin, for instance, with: {% for image in flickr.recent_images %}. Wouldn’t that be cool?