[Radiant] [ANN] SnS Minifier

[Chris Parrish]

I did say more coming soon, right... So here's another.

This time it's the SnS Minifier Extension found at:
https://secure.svnrepository.com/s_swanki/open/radiant/extensions/sns_minifier/tags/latest

Again, early release (v0.1) so please give me feedback.

 From the README file:

= Styles 'n Scripts Minifier

Adds the ability to minify CSS and JS files. This way, you can keep your 
code
the way you like it in the editor but serve up minified files. (And if you
really want to speed things up, add GZip to the mix to have your server 
crunch
it further).


== Available Minifiers

* JSMin v1.0.0 - This is based on the original C code by Douglas Crockford
(http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html) but wonderfully repackaged
into a plugin by Ryan Grove (http://github.com/rgrove/cssmin/tree/master).

JSMin is often seen as being an older but safer technology. It certainly
doesn't pack as well as some others out there but is tried and true.

* CSSMin v1.0.0 - This is Ryan Grove's port of the YUI Compressor's
(http://www.julienlecomte.net/yuicompressor/) CSS minifier (which was itself
taken from Isaac Schlueter’s regular expression based CSS minifier
(http://foohack.com/2007/09/squish-it-good-code-compression-for-the-masses/)

Ryan nicely ported this one to a plugin too. And I added a minor addition
too (which is available via options -- see below)

* Packr - James Coglan was nice enough to port Dean Edward's famous Packer
(http://dean.edwards.name/packer/). More about the plugin version used here
can be found at: (http://blog.jcoglan.com/packr/)

Packer is a great tool but it is pretty strict about terminating javascripts
with semicolons (http://dean.edwards.name/packer/usage/sample.html).

* Rainpress - This is a newer ruby project by Uwe L. Korn to minify CSS 
files
(http://code.google.com/p/rainpress/). There isn't much history but it
seems solid enough.

I had to repackage this one into a plugin (and strip a lot of the command
line stuff out). Originally I did all this as I didn't know about CSSMin.
Anyway, I included this too basically because I'd already done everything.


== Usage
It's pretty simple, really. Once installed, it adds a "Minify?" checkbox 
to the
bottom of your Stylesheet and Javascript pages. Just check the box and 
save the
file. Viola, the content is minified.

The configuration can be changed via the @@settings variable inside:
/lib/text_asset_mixins.rb

There, you can choose which minifiers you want to use and set any of their
available options.


== Requirements
You'll need:
* Radiant v0.6.7 or higher
* Styles 'n Scripts Extension v0.5 or higher


== Installation
Install the extension in your Radiant project like:
[your project]/vendor/extensions/sns_minifier

You will need the Styles 'n Scripts extension installed for this to work 
and you
will also probably need to change your project's environment.rb file to 
twiddle
the load order (the SnS Extension must be loaded before this one). For 
example,
you could use something like:
config.extensions = [ :all, :sns_minifier ]


== To Do
Well first of all this extension needs some specs.

But after that I'd *love* to find where someone ported the YUI 
Compressor (JS
version) to ruby. It appears to be much more flexible (read forgiving) than
Packer while still crunching stuff way down. A second option would be to let
admins install the java version and make this plugin interact with that.