Blogging Pubbitch

Spent today putting some elbow grease into getting the Moveable Type plugin sorted out for my PHP based blogging tool, and it now works sufficiently well for me to start making a move to using it for my day-to-day blogging happiness, and to prove it, this should be my last post on right here for a little while. Instead, I'll be trying to post more on Blogging Pubbitch 2.0, which is running the new software (downloadable from here if you want to play with it)

Looking at the state of play right now, there are a handful of things that I need to do:

• Add a mechanism to upload content easily, possibly via one of the automated protocols. XML-RPC? Either that, or have a web-based front-end to enter blog entries
• Write a database format so entries can be stored in one, as well as a more robust HTML Entry class and source so that I can bring all the site into my blog
• Provide a facility for static rendering of content
• Search functionality
• Store metadata, if nothing else. Fortunately, this site is low volume, so it's not a big headache for now
• Provide more ways of accessing content. A calendar might be the key to finding out what needs to be done
• Improve the HTML template to make it look a little more pleasing :)
• Comments! Comments! Comments!

That's enough to keep me going for now. What have I let myself in for?

Just a quick one, cos I have to disappear for a few days, but I've got an updated version of blog4php uploaded to here. Amendments include a nifty little stylesheet for the HTML presentation, and a couple of bug fixes. In addition, I've now tested it on Win32 and PHP 4.2 and it works okay for me.

Get it from here.

Having created an RSS template by the simple expedient of taking the one from this site and changing some of the tags, and after fleshing out some of the code and adding some more supporting functions, Blog4PHP can now provide an RSS feed that's readable (at least by Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal RSS parser)

Though none of the template parsing code needed changing (miraculously) there have been some changes around the place:

• "Tags.inc" is now significantly longer
• Permalinks are now supported by the entries. The current implementation is a bit simplistic, relying on brute force to do the hard work, but it works.
• The RSS can be found using autodiscovery
• Changes have been made to the blog and entry classes, allowing the blog to return an ordered list of entries, rather than the previous "first come, first served" order they were in before
• Some dead code has been removed, particularly the "Tag.inc" and supporting classes. Just watch as I check them out of CVS and ruin all that hard work :)
• The config.inc file has been rejigged to make a little more sense.

You can grab the new release from here but the old version's still there if you want to see how much has changed.

I've spent the past couple of days hacking together a simple templating system for my blogging tool and that now works for me, so without further dithering I've uploaded the first release to here, ready for you to have a play with. Be warned that it undoubtedly has rough edges, is lacking functionality, has dead code all over the shop and all the other gumph and pitfalls which goes for a release straight from a CVS tree.

It's not been tested completely on Windows, but it should work on any system using PHP 4+, though I'd recommend PHP 4.3 or above, because that's what I use :) Installation is simple: just unpack into your public_html folder (or equivalent) read the README and edit "config.inc" If you're concerned about security, the only thing that really needs to be publically accessible is the "blog.php" page, the rest can be hidden away out of public reach but on the PHP include path.

The next stage is to add an RSS flavour so that I can read entries in my favourite aggregator, and to flesh out the Entry interface to include such minimal considerations as the date published --- I told you that this was basic. That, and finish of the Entry subclass that reads Moveable Type back ups. Once those are done, I'll start eating my own dogfood.

Download Blog4PHP Some day, I'll have a fancy name for it. Any suggestions?

Spent the morning putting together a basic templating language in PHP. It's now up and running with simple tags (which are entirely programmable and are not hard-coded) Just need to implement tags that contain a body and possibly hook up the code supporting parameters, and we're away!

I spent a while hacking last night hacking away at my PHP-based blogging tool, and it now can cope with multiple separate data stores (in theory) Currently, only a file system store is supported, but I'm working on a MT store so that I can move from MT to my own code.

I also implemented a basic wiki-like syntax, but it currently lacks support for linking to other documents, so obviously still needs a little work. On the plus-side, this means that I've now got a standard format for blog entries that it's reasonably simple to convert to and from. Currently, blog entries can be in plain text or HTML format, but I expect there to be a need to support the internal format that MT uses too. Shouldn't be too bad :)

There's also some skeleton code to support a templating system, with different output formats being available. The only one that has some meat on the bones is the HTML format, but there's basic RSS support in there too.

Once I've decided on a license and get the RSS and HTML output formatters working, as well as supporting a migration from my moveable type installation, I'll make a source-drop here on the site ready for people to use and abuse.

Actually, I'd like some comments about the license to release this under. Personally, I'm leaning towards either the LGPL or the GPL. There are arguments for both, and I'm not too stressed, so if people who might use this software have a preference either way, you've got a couple of days (from 2003-03-18) to tell me, and as long as I have no strong reason not to use the majority vote, I'll go with that.

Update: The MT migration might be a bit more involved than I thought it would be, because it requires support for DBM in the version of PHP that you're using. None of the installations of PHP that I have to hand actually have that compiled in. Might drop that idea for now and implement it when I get a chance to relax a little bit.

All the coolest boys on the block are writing their own blogging tools, and since I need a decent project for the series of magazine articles I'm writing about PHP, now seems like the ideal time to get cracking on my own. The question is, what do I want to be able to do?

Well, obviously, entering text should be a doddle, so it'd be handy if I could feed it text files in a directory in a variety of formats (you know, plain text, HTML and also email) as well as storing data in a more traditional database. Naturally, having a simple textarea to enter data should also be supported, perhaps using some sort of wiki format so that you don't need to be a ninja web-developer in order to get your blog looking nice. Categories should also be easy to do, and it goes without saying that output should be in a variety of formats.

To reduce server load, it would be great if the blog supported static rendering of files. And it goes without saying that it'd be great to support pingback, trackback and all the other bells and whistles that are coming to the fore.

Oh, and comments. And some means of easily handling your blogroll. And, naturally, it should all be under some sort of Open Source license.

Anything I've forgotten?

Update: After a couple of hours of coding, the raw framework is in place, and I can publish text based blog entries. Obviously, not supporting skinning atm, and it doesn't have a nice calendar, but it's a start.