LnBlog

LnBlog 0.9.0 is finalized

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Well, I'm done. LnBlog 0.9.0 is now officially available. You can grab the zip archive here or go to the download page to get it.

There are a lot of new features in this version. You read a somewhat more thoughtful discussion of them in the beta 1 announcement. In this post, I'll just give the quickie list.

Most data files are now XML. Old formats are still supported (no need to convert).
Support for running blogs on multiple subdomains from a single installation.
Consolidated the per-blog PHP wrapper scripts.
Support for saving draft entries to be published later.
New Linksleeve anti-spam plugin.
Improved support for blogging APIs, including support for the MoveableType API.
Reply management pages for bulk listing/deleting of replies.
Improvements (?) to file writing configuration.

To upgrade from a previous release, follow the usual procedure:

Make backup copies of each of your blogs, just to be safe.
Rename your old LnBlog directory on the server.
Upload the new LnBlog in its place.
Copy your old LnBlog/userdata directory into the new LnBlog directory, overwriting the existing files.
Log into the administration page and run an upgrade on each of your blogs.

As an additional note, the URLs for XMLRPC-based services has changed. LnBlog has adopted the Wordpress style and just consolidated them all (APIs, Pingbacks, etc.) in a single xmlrpc.php script located in the root LnBlog directory. If you want to use a blogging client that supports the Blogger 1.0, MetaWeblog, or MovableType API, you should point it to that file.

It's late and that's about all I can think of for now. As usual, feel free to pass on any comments, suggestions, feature requests, or bug reports. You can e-mail me, leave a comment, or use the SourceForge issue tracker or forums.

Last beta for 0.9.0

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Time for the last beta release: LnBlog-0.9.0b3.zip. No new innovations here, just some bug fixes for draft updating, JavaScript on subdomains, and a few other things. Barring any more bug discoveries, this will become the final release before too long.

Version 0.9.0 beta 2

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Well, here's the next beta: LnBlog 0.9.0 beta 2. There's nothing really new in this release - just big fixes from the last beta. Mostly they're related to the URL changes from getting rid of the zillion wrapper scripts.

So far, this beta seems to be working pretty well. I'm going to let it bake for a week or so, and if all goes well, make it final. In the mean time, I'm going to try to work on the end-user documentation a bit.

LnBlog 0.9.0 beta 1

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It's finally that time again. LnBlog 0.9.0 beta 1 is ready for those adventurous souls who feel like taking it for a spin. You can download it here. I actually hadn't intended to get to version 0.9.0 quite yet, but on the way to 0.8.3, I accumulated so many features and under-the-hood changes that a higher version number seemed justified.

If you want to upgrade to the beta version on a live web server, I strongly recommend backing up everything related to your existing LnBlog installation. That means your entire LnBlog directory and each one of your blog directories. I don't expect that anything will go wrong (it didn't for me), but there are a lot of changes in this version and I'd hate to see anyone lose data because of it.

In addition, if you are upgrading from a previous release, please note that you will need to run an upgrade on each of your blogs. You probably won't forget this because there is now a helpful reminder in the sidebar under you logout link.

As for the changes and new features, here's the quick list:

Entry, reply, and user data files have all been converted to XML format. Old files will still be read, so there is no need to convert.
Support for running blogs on multiple subdomains from a single installation.
Lots of those annoying wrapper scripts in the blog, entry, etc. directories have been removed. For existing blogs, the unused wrappers will be deleted when you run an upgrade.
Support for saving draft entries to be published later.
New Linksleeve anti-spam plugin.
Lots of fixes to the blogging APIs. Note that the Blogger, MetaWeblog, and Pingback implementations are now combined in a single xmlrpc.php file, so adjust the URIs in your blogging client accordingly.
Added a "manage replies" feature to view all replies for various levels of archives.

I'm not planning to add any more significant features to this release, otherwise it will drag on forever. However, I am a bit unsure about some of the user interface elements, and I would love any feedback people have on them.

My two big UI questions are the new feature in the entry editor to automatically add a link when you add a file to be uploaded. There is a checkbox in the entry options to turn that off, but I'm generally not satisfied with this. It would probably be better to pop up a prompt window, but that will wait for another release....

The other thing I'm unsure about is the new file writing setup page. It's significantly longer and more verbose than the previous version. That's partially because I added the subdomain options to it, and partially because I added file permission settings and some option buttons to help guide the choice. I'm not really happy with the final product, though. I'm thinking it would be better to break the different sections out into a multi-step wizard kind of interface. I'm also not sure I'm doing a good job explaining the options and issues with configuring file writing. I guess I'm just not sure how to explain the technical details of the the various possible permission, ownership, and safe mode configurations in a non-technical way.

As usual, any feedback is greatly appreciated - suggestions, bug reports, whatever. Leave a comment, send an e-mail, or use the SourceForge tracker. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to accept feedback via telepathy.

LnBlog 0.8.2 finally released

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Well, it's finally release time again. I've put up LnBlog 0.8.2. As usual, you can find it on the download page or just grab the release archive.

I'll be honest with you: it's been so long since the last stable release, I don't really remember all the changes. I just know there have been quite a few of them. I'll try to highlight the big ones, but if you're really curious, just read the last few blog entries and/or the changelog.

Change organization of theme style sheets.
Added option in system.ini to group all replies (comments, Pingbacks, and TrackBacks) into a single list.
Added mass deletion of replies.
Improved the sidebar calendar and made it AJAX-powered.
Added interface on admin page for administrators to modify user accounts.
Converted entry data files to XML format (don't worry - it'll still read the old format).

Thanks to everyone who contacted me with problems, suggestions, and other feedback for this release. Please keep it up - I really appreciate it! And if you find anything wrong in this release, you know what to do. Thanks!

The next beta and XML

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Here's the next one: LnBlog 0.8.2 beta 2. I think I'm done adding things for this release, so I'm going to let this beta cook for a few days or so and then release it. I would have done the release today, but I added some fairly major things in the last couple of days and wanted to test them out a little more.

If you've been keeping score so far, this release contains changes to the theme stylesheets, mass comment/TrackBack/Pingback deletion, reply ungrouping, and a new AJAX calendar. The last big change, and the reason I want to let it cook, is the entry file format.

I finally got with the program and decided to start storing entry, article, and comment data in XML format. The ad hoc format I was using before worked well enough, but it was, well, very hacky. Basically the only reason I was using it was because I didn't want to depend on any optional XML libraries and I couldn't find a good one that I could just drop into the package. However, I finally broke down and wrote my own.

All I really wanted was a little library that did two things:
1) Read an XML file and put the contents in a DOM tree type data structure.
2) Take such a structure and serialize it to an XML file, automatically escaping angle braces and entities.
Unfortunately, PHP 4 doesn't come with anything like that. At least, not as a standard module. All it has is a thin wrapper around expat, an event-based XML parser. Expat is OK, but it doesn't output a DOM tree structure and it doesn't do anything related to serializing such a structure. So I basically just wrote a couple of classes: SimpleXMLReader and SimpleXMLWriter. They're found in the new lib/xml.php file.

The SimpleXMLReader is a wrapper around expat that builds a sloppy DOM tree. It also has the ability to convert that tree into an object. The SimpleXMLWriter takes an object and serializes it as XML. The way it works is that each element under the base node is treated as a field of the same name in a PHP class. This allows me to add fields to classes without having to account for them in the serialization routine. Anything that's new will automatically be written to the file and old files will simply not set the new fields.

Of course, the new classes are still pretty simplistic, but they're working pretty well so far. However, I strongly suspect they'll choke on text that's not encoded in UTF-8 or something compatible. Thus I added an option to turn it off. Just set the following in your userconfig.cfg to revert to writing old-style files:
USE_OLD_ENTRY_FORMAT = true ENTRY_DEFAULT_FILE = current.htm ENTRY_PATH_SUFFIX = .htm COMMENT_PATH_SUFFIX = .txt
The last three lines just change back all the settings back to the old values.

Note that support for the old file formats has been maintained, so there's no need to convert old data. New and edited posts will be written in XML format, but old entries and comments will be read normally.

New beta

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Here's a quick beta release for anyone who's feeling adventurous. This is LnBlog 0.8.2 beta 1, which includes bug fixes, theme reworking, and some new features. I'm going to let this bake for a couple of weeks before releasing the final version.

This includes some reworking of the theme system, so there may be problems with some themes. Basically, I added some documentation to the default templates and consolidated the stylesheets. Refer to the default theme for an example of how things are organized now.

On the feature addition side, I added a facility for bulk reply deletion. Basically, I got sick of deleting comment spams one at a time, so now you can click a check box and mark any number of comments for deletion. I also added a system.ini variable called GroupReplies, which is turned on by default. When turned off, this will cause all replies on an entry (comments, TrackBacks, and Pingbacks) to be displayed in a single list, like many other blogging systems do. When turned on, it will keep the old behaviour of seperating by type of reply.

As usual, let me know if you find any bugs and I'll get them fixed for the final release.

LnBlog 0.8.1

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

LnBlog 0.8.1 is now available. As usual, you can grab it from the download page.

This release is for bug fixes and some minor feature enhancements. The bug fixes include Unicode issues with editing posts and pretty permalinks, as well as a very annoying issue where newlines were not properly translated to HTML <br /> tags in LBCode. Many thanks to MoonMind for pointing these out.

The feature enhancements are all small. There is now an LBCode color tag. I also changed the LBCode editor to remove the quote buttons (which I never used) and add a color button with drop-down selector and an alignment selector for the image button. For entries with an enclosure, I also added an HTML link tag to the enclosure file. Lastly, I included the new BotBlock plugin in this release.

That pretty much sums it up. As usual, please let me know if you have any thoughts, ideas, or bugs to reports.

LnBlog 0.8.0, "No Need for TrackBack"

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Well, it's finally here: LnBlog 0.8.0 is now available. You can grab it here or go to the download page.

Several files have been removed in this release, so to upgrade, you should upload the new directory to your server and then copy/move your old userdata folder into it. Before that, though, you might want to take a look at the new system.ini file, just to see what the new options are. That part is optional, though.

Lots of changes and lots of bug fixes in this release. I won't bore you with all (or even most) of the specifics. That's what the changelog is for. However, for this version, I did do some extra testing and even documented the outstanding problems in this release. Fortunately, most of them are relatively small.

There are bunches of new features. First, LnBlog now has support for Pingbacks. You can turn on and off both the sending and receiving of Pingbacks on a per-entry basis. Note that there is an AllowLocalPingback setting in the entryconfig section of the system.ini file. If you set this to 0, then LnBlog will not send Pingback pings to enrties on your

Second, there's a new standard plugin: the TrackbackValidator. Basically, this checks the URLs of incoming TrackBack pings to see if they link to your blog. This works on the principle that legitimate TrackBacks almost always link to you, but TrackBack spam almost never does. So far, it seems to have completely eliminated my TrackBack spam problem.

Third, there's now a standard profile.ini file. This adds a custom "contact me" link field for your profile. This field takes an HTML link as its input. If this is given, then your e-mail address will not be displayed in your profile. You can use this with the ContactForm plugin.

Fourth, LnBlog now has simple Podcast support. Basically, this means you can add an enclosure URL to your entries and it will be included as an RSS enclosure in the RSS 2.0 feed (if you have one). You can either enter the RSS attributes directly, specifying url="http://somehost/file" length="12345" type="audio/mpeg", or, if the file in on the same server as LnBlog, you can give the URL and let LnBlog compute the file size and MIME type. Note that you can also use LBCode-style relative URIs, giving only the name for files in the entry directory, or a path relative to the blog root.

Last, I've reworked the post editor, including a lot more JavaScript. I've condensed the LBCode editor buttons, added a drop-down menu to add topics, and hidden the extra settings in an expandable box. I think it's much easier to use now. Also note that there's an EditorOnBottom setting to the entryconfig section of the system.ini file. Although it's not acutally in the default file, the default value is 0, which puts the editor buttons above the text area. Add this setting with the value of 1 to put them below.

I think that pretty much sums up the big things for this release. As usual, all forms of feedback are welcome. If you have any comments, find any bugs, or whatever, feel free to leave a comment, e-mail me, or whatever.

Release preview

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It's time for a preview release. We'll call this one LnBlog 0.8.0-pre1. I don't really want to call it a beta release, because that would imply that the feature set is at least close to finalized. I'm actually still not sure if I want to release after a little more testing or add a few more features and call it version 1.0.0.

Since this is a testing release, I of course recommend keeping a backup copy of the previous version around. No blog upgrades are required, so just upload the new version and rename it after your old installation. Note a few old plugins are now redundant and have been removed and a file has been added in the userdata folder, so I the recommended starting with the fresh installation directory and copying over your old userdata folder rather than trying to upload the new files into your existing directory.

This is going to be a major feature addition release. The big one in this release is support for sending and receiving Pingbacks. If you're not already aware, Pingbacks are very similar to TrackBacks, in that they are used to send a notification to another blog that you've linked to them. The main differences are that 1) Pingbacks are significantly more complicated to implement and 2) Pingbacks don't suffer from the same spam problems as TrackBacks, due to the fact that the server, rather than the client, determines what data goes into them.

The second bigish feature is support for enclosures. Basically, this means podcasting support. An enclosure is just a hint to an RSS reader that a post is related to a particular file so that it can be downloaded in the background. All you need to do is enter the URL of the file in the box and, provided it's on the same server, LnBlog will calculate the MIME type and file size to insert into the RSS feed. I also added a default profile.ini file that allows you to enter a "contact me" URL. Basically, you enter the HTML for the link you want and this will be displayed in your profile instead of your e-mail address. You can use that in ContactForm plugin.

There's a bunch of smaller stuff in this release too. Check the change log for the details. For starters, I did some cleanup to various plugins. For example, I added a "ban and delete" option to the IPBan plugin, added the "new standard" RSS icons to the sidebar, made the calendar look slightly less crappy, added a stylesheet to the RSS 2 feeds (so they look like something in a browser), and created RSS feeds for comments even when there are no comments yet.

There are also a number of small bug fixes. For example, TrackBacks finally work regardless of whether or not you have CURL. I also found a bug with receiving the response code when sending TrackBacks. I also fixed a few small display issues that were weird or didn't make sense.

Last, there's a bit of code cleanup and consolidation. For instance, the TrackbackNotifier and CommentNotifier plugins are now gone, replaced by a generic ReplyNotifier plugin that handles comments, TrackBacks, and Pingbacks. I also consolidated some functions in the utility library and a few things in the entry subclasses.

I'm debating whether to hold off on the next release, add some features, and go straight to version 1.0. Before that, I want to at least add a simple theme editor. My plan is to do something very simple and hacky: a stylesheet editor. Basically, just a GUI to automatically generate a stylesheet based on settings entered by the user. The idea is that this stylesheet will just be inserted into the page last, thus overriding the default settings for the theme.

Other possibile features include more granular security, support for draft entries, and Atom feeds, among other cleanup. If I'm going to go straight to version 1.0, then I'll probably try to do some of these first. Anyone have any thoughts on other features for 1.0 or opinions on the release schedule?