More on the story engine

I started working up the story engine last night in Ruby. Greg suggested that XSLT would be perfect for it if I stored my stories as XML. Do a simple transformation, and voila, a story in XHTML with layout and everything. I was hoping I could knock it out in a single evening.

Turns out Ruby and XSLT are two more separate critters than I thought — there’s no default library to handle it, and the three or so available are older and lack documentation. Better yet, the one easily available as a gem doesn’t use Ruby’s nice REXML, it uses LibXML.

Combine all that with never having used XSLT before, and I’m in for some annoyance. Drat. Then, if I want any WP integration (like searching, for instance), I’ll need to write a WP plugin of some sort.

I think I’ll switch to writing a WP plugin. 🙂