I’m a big fan of Pimki, but I think it’s starting to show it’s age. Pimki is based on Instiki, which was built on top of ruby on rails, before it was even called rails. I think it’s time for something new, and I intend to write it. I’m sure this won’t set the world on fire. It’s not the sexiest project in the world, but I think as a learning exercise, it’s got a lot of potential. So, here is my plan to create Pimki’s replacement.
I’m going to use Merb, because it is ORM agnostic. Rails has a lot more bells and whistles, that would probably make writing this a heck of a lot easier for a guy like me. The problem is that Rails depends too heavily on ActiveRecord. My problem with ActiveRecord is that it expects a SQL database. I want this thing to be installed via gem, and i don’t want the user to have to install anything else.
Pimki uses Madeleine for object persistence, and while I don’t have anything against it, I’d like to use an RDBMS. I want to keep the structure as close to a normal crud app as possible. So I’m going to give KirbyBase a try. This will keep the database in ruby, so there is nothing extra for the user to install.
So, that’s what I know so far. I’ve got some other ideas for tasklists and such that I’ll probably write about at a later time, but I have to get something started first.
The first step is going to be to write a Merb ORM plugin for KirbyBase. The plugin will need to handle migrations, validations, and configuration, as well as model relationships.
I use pimki myself (the 1.x, never got 2.0 working nicely) and agree wholeheartedly that as much as I like it, it hasn’t been updated in forever nor does it seem like it ever will be. I’d thought about working on a replacement and was considering a file-based backend to trivialize migration, etc. but hadn’t gotten around to it. I’d be interested in to know what you come up with or if you find a pre-made replacement.