Thoughts on v3:

The overarching goals for V3 is to make Reptar simpler and easier to use.

Removing Plugins, Move to Middleware

Having an API requires maintaining the API, as well as learning how to use the API. It would be better to just use the Reptar instance directly, and any exposed objects and methods on the Reptar instance. This will remove the need to maintain an external API as well as help users of Reptar learn how Reptar itself works, as you'll be interacting directly with Reptar.

This means that plugins will be removed from the config.yml file.

You'll only be able to add middleware via a new local (to your project) reptar.js file. This will be considered a more advanced use case and as such will require usage of JavaScript. Sharing of middleware will continue to be done via NPM packages.

Question: When you run reptar build in your project, if it finds the presence of the reptar.js file it will use that to configure middleware. What should it do with that file? Look for an exported configure function to call to allow you to configure reptar as you want? I still want to support the rest of the Reptar CLI tools, so there needs to be some way to configure Reptar without replacing it.

// reptar.js

const excerptMiddleware = require('reptar-middleware-excerpt');

exports.configure = function(reptarInstance) {
  // Shared middleware.
  reptarInstance.use(excerptMiddleware);

  reptarInstance.use(function middlewareFunction(destination, reptar) {
    // Do what you want, custom middleware.
  });

  reptarInstance.config.set(newConfigFile);

  // Or whatever else.
}

Remove Collections as a built-in type, have it be a built-in middleware

This is to further emphasize the simplicity of Reptar. Reptar is comprised of utility functions, which help with reading files from the disk and rendering Markdown to HTML and then writing back to disk.

That being the case the collectionsMiddleware will just ingest all the Markdown files in your site and then use them to create Collections and CollectionPages.

I have this mostly working locally already. External API should remain the same but this is a step towards being more easily de-coupled from Reptar core.

Data files will also be moved as a built-in middleware

This is even simpler to do and will be done just for organization sake.

Remove and rewrite current 1st-part plugins to be middleware

This is namely

• reptar-excerpt
• reptar-html-minifier

Question with reptar-html-minifier: This is done after files are rendered. So perhaps there should be support for afterWare - code that runs after Reptar is done running.

// reptar.js

exports.configure = function(reptarInstance) {
  reptarInstance.useAfter(function afterWareFunction(destination, reptar) {
    // Do what you want, custom middleware.
  });
}

Rethink Themes

My main problem with how themes work right now is that all they're truly concerned with is defining how to process JavaScript and LESS/SASS files. This leads me to believe that Themes aren't really necessary. What we need to have is someway to define how to process JavaScript/LESS/SASS (asset files).

I'm not sure what that looks like yet but ideally Reptar can understand any .js file in your site and know how to process it. Perhaps it can be as simple as that, process every JS/LESS/SASS file and just copy it over to your destination site.

I was worried about a whitelist or blacklist on which files to include or exclude for processing however it's probably safe to process every file. It doesn't mean that every file will be included in your site. So you can have one main.js and one main.less that includes other files, and only that file will be included in your template file.