LnBlog

I think I've pretty much finished all the new functionality for version 0.3.0. I'll be installing it on the web server this weekend to test it and, with any luck, releasing it not too long after that.

There will be a whole lot of changes in the next release. First, I've added a basic user account system with simple access control. This makes it possible for a small group of people to collaborate on a weblog without all sharing one login. Readers will be able to identify and contact each author individually. It also serves to identify logged-in blog authors in the comments, which is nice. The addition of e-mail information also allowed me to add support for e-mail notification of new comments.

The second bgi feature is that I finally added basic TrackBack support. On second reading, it turns out that the TrackBack specification is pretty simple. To receive pings, all you need to do is process an HTTP POST request. This is trivial in PHP. Likewise, sending pings is pretty simple. For now, I just added a form that can be filled out and submitted to send a ping. I implemented an automatic ping mechanism, but I haven't tested it yet and I'm not sure how much of an excerpt (if any) should be sent by default.

Last, I'm trying to add a new theme. Of course, it still looks a lot like the other themes, but will hopefully be somewhat nicer to look at. I finally decided that the skepticats theme sucks and that I'd like to use something different for LinLog. Hopefully I'll be able to make something that looks pretty and goes with a picture of a penguin. ;)