LnBlog

Well, I'll be away on vacation for a week starting on Saturday, so this is probably a good time to put up the next version. You can get it from the download page.

This release is just a collection of small enhancements and bug fixes. You can look at the change log if you really want the details. Among the noticable enhancements are some HTML cleanup, the edit/delete/upload links for entries have been moved out of the sidebar and now respect security, and I've updated the long-neglected Skepticats theme.

As usual e-mail me any suggestions or bug reports. Have fun!

Right now, I'm working on polishing up LnBlog. The basic functionality is pertty much there, so I figure now is the time to make things work and look nice. I'm thinking there will be one more "clean-up" release in the 0.3.x series, and then I'll start with the new features I mentioned the other day for the 0.4.0 release.

There are lots of little aesthetic and usability issues to address. For one thing, it's not always easy to know where you are in a blog without looking at the browser address bar. I definitely need to add a few labels and it would probably be nice to add some kind of breadbrumbs or "smart" links. Maybe this is something that could go in the menu bar....

There is also plenty of code clean-up to do on the back end. I think I've still got a few vestigial methods floating around in some of the classes and I can think of a few places where things could be consolidated. Not that anyone but me cares about that stuff, but it'll make things easier to maintain.

I just found a small bug in the new version. Then adding a new article (not a blog entry), the LBCode buttons will actually submit the form. Needless to say, that's not what's supposed to happen.

I have uploaded a new zip file for version 0.3.3, so if you haven't downloaded it yet, don't worry about it. The only people who will be affected are those who downloaded it between the release announcement and now.

The fix is just a single line in one template. Just download this zip file and extract it to your LnBlog/themes/default/templates directory. Just overwrite the old file.

Alternatively, if you don't feel like messing with the zip file, open up the
LnBlog/themes/default/templates/article_edit_tpl.php file in your favorite text editor and find line 9, which should look like this:
<?php include("js_editor.php"); ?>
Simply cut-and-paste this to move it one line up, to line 8. That will put it between the <fieldset> and <form> tags, which will keep it from submitting the form.

I've added LnBlog 0.3.3 to the download page. You will want to log in to the administrative pages and run an upgrade on any blogs you have (use the "Upgrade blog to current version" box) to make sure all the new features are in place. Please note that from now on, the administrative pages will use paths relative to the document root, not the current directory. Therefore, paths like ../myblog are no longer needed. If the blog is in the root of your web site, you can just use myblog. If you have any problems, please e-mail me and I'll try to work them out with you.

This fixes a bunch of bugs and adds a few small features.

First, on the feature side, I added buttons to the JavaScript entry editor for block quotations and code. I also added undocumented img-left and img-right LBCode tags. These are exactly the same as the img tag, except that they float the image to the left and right respectively. I also added optional citations for the two types of quote.

In addition, I've added a page and sidebar link to change your user information, including password. I can't believe I forgot to put this in earlier.

You'll also notice that there's now some basic documentation on the theme system. It's not terribly helpful yet, but it's a start.

On the bug fix front, these comments alerted me to a problem with URLs in comments, which I've fixed. I also fixed the URL computations to account for web servers on non-standard ports.

This page alerted me to another problem that I've fixed. Apparently, in my efforts to make FTP file writimg easier to configure, I broke the configuration for native file writing! Not that native file writing is recommended (it's a pain to deal with), but it should work again now.

It just occurred to me that I never mentioned that I set up a Freshmeat project for LnBlog. Not that it's gotten an awful lot of traffic, but it's there. Although, I see two people did subscribe to it, which is pretty cool.

In other news, I think I've decided that the next release will focus on three things. First, I want to finish documenting the theme system. I've gotten it to the point where it's fairly flexible and easy to use, and it would be nice if people knew how to customize the look of their pages.

Second, I'd like to modlarize the sidebar. Right now, it's just one big PHP template, and I'd like to make it easier to selectively include and exclude things. It would also be nice to add some configuration, e.g. the amount of history shown in the recent entries and archives secions.

Last, I need to add some kind of search function. It may be an actual built-in search, or just a box to search Google for the current site, or both. It's really starting to bother me, though, as I've got a lot of information on LinLog that I'm going to want to look up periodically, and it would be nice not to have to open up a new window.