LnBlog

Well, I've been slowly plugging along at LnBlog 0.4.0 for a while now, and I have a test release for anyone who cares. Feel free to grab the 0.4.0 alpha 1 release and give it a spin. Note that this requires upgrading you blogs. Since this isn't a stable release, you might consider making backup copies of your blog files and you old LnBlog installation. Also note that the passwd.php, fsconfig.php, and sitemap.htm files have moved from the LnBlog installation root to the userdata subdirectory.

There's still a lot of polishing work to be done and not many visible changes, so don't get too excited. I've added a few small usability enhancements, such as smarter redirects and form field highlighting, but the big change is the addition of a plugin system. It's an event-driven plugin system, if that means anything to you, which allows plugins to be added or over-riddenon both a system wide and per-blog basis. In fact, as of today, the banner, menu bar, and side bar are all created using plugins.

Don't look for a stable release any earlier than a few weeks from now. There's still lots of coding and testing to do, plus I'm way behind on documentation. I'm working on some technical documentation (e.g. for plugin authors) as well as adding some comments in the code for auto-documentation using Natural Docs.

I think I'm done adding features for the 0.4.0 release, but I'm already thinking about 0.5.0. One thing I'd like to do is add some plugins or conditional features to take advantage of Apache's .htaccess files. In particular, I'd like to try to use mod_rewrite to get rid of the need to upgrade the PHP wrapper scripts in each blog data directory. Another cool thing would be to add alternate implementations of the back-end classes so that data could be stored in a MySQL database. The idea is that you could simply set a single configuration variable to switch between file and database storage. I've already tightened the encapsulation of the back-end classes in preparation for something like that, but it's still a long way off.