LnBlog

I have just released LnBlog 0.4.0 final. It is available from the download page. Aside from a few bug fixes, this is pretty much the same as the beta releases, which you can read about in the previous posts. If you care about the gorey details, read the ChangeLog. For those with a short attention span, here's the short list of upgrade details:

1. The fsconfig.php, passwd.php, and sitemap.htm files have moved from the installation root directory to the "userdata" subdirectory. When you do the upgrade, copy them there. Note: you will need to go to the admin page and run an upgrade for each blog as well.
2. There is now a plugin system. Various features that were once part of the core have moved to standard plugins, including the sidebar modules, e-mail notification for comments, and RSS feed generation. I've also added plugins to generate an Apache .htaccess file when a blog is created or upgraded and one to add RDF code TrackBack auto-detection to blog entires.
3. There were a sickening number of bug fixes, including problems with the file writing setup and Unicode handline. Thanks to WGM for all his help on the alpha and beta releases.

I think the posts from the beta releases pretty much say everything there is to say, so I'll leave it at that. As usual, if you have any comments, questions, or bug reports, feel free to e-mail me or leave a commnent.

Well, here's another beta release. This one is verson 0.4.0 beta 2 and, with any luck, this will turn into the final release. This includes several bug fixes, including a bug in deleting comments, a bug in the login page URL redirection, and hopefully, the bizarre blog creation bug that's been plaguing WGM. I did a little markup and documentation clean-up.

Here's another test release for anyone who's interested. I'm calling this one version 0.4.0 beta 1, since I think it's getting close to ready. I've been doing a lot of bug fixes, as you may have noticed from the previous comment threads. And speaking of the comments, I'd like to thank WGM for all the input and bug reports. I really appreciate the help.

I'll start with a brief recap. Since version 0.3.4, there have been an awful lot of changes to the back-end code. If you're actually reading the code (and I don't know of many people who are), I've been trying to move as much as I can out of the page and template file and into the classes and plugins. The idea is that the "frosting," if you will, goes into the plugins and can be easily removed or reworked independent of the rest of the code base, while the classes provide a rich inerface for data retreival, storage, and generation, and so can be reimplemented in different ways, if needed. This leaves the page file more or less free of implementation details and essentially maintenance free (although it's never that easy) and it leaves the templates largely free of code so that users can tweak the heck out of them.

On the feature side, not a lot has changed. I've added a plugin system and moved the sidebar, site map, banner, RSS stuff, and comment notification to plugins. Before, all that was in either templates or classes, so if you like all those things, then nothing has changed. If, however, you want to get rid of any of them, you can now just move or delete the plugin file. I've also added two new plugins in this release: one that adds META tags to the page (description, author, and generator tags, to be precise) and another that creates an Apache .htaccess file when you create or upgrade a blog. Right now, the .htaccess file just redirects direct requests for blog data files, but I plan to add other capabilities sooner or later. Note that on some Apache configurations (e.g. Ubuntu's default configuration), this .htaccess file can cause an internal server error. If that happens, you will have to either change the server configuration or just delete/edit the file manually.

Among the accumulated bug fixes in this release are better handling for Unicode posts, fixes in the file writing setup, and various comment handling fixes. If you want to try this release with data from LnBlog 0.3.4, you will move your passwd.php, fsconfig.php, and sitemap.htm files to from the LnBlog root directory to the userdata subdirectory and then upgrade your blog's wrapper scripts to the current version. To do this, just login to the administrative page, put the name of your blog into the upgrade box (if your blog is in the web root, the you should just need the directory name, not a full path), click the button, and wait. This could take a few seconds.

That's it for now. If you have any suggestions or bug reports, you can either e-mail me or post a comment. Have fun!

How about another alpha release? You can download it here.

Things are coming along slowly. I added a fix for posting in Unicode in LBcode markup mode, along with a few other bugs. I also did a little more work on the plugins. For one thing, I moved the RSS handling into several plugins, since it doesn't really need to be in the core or have any kind of real user interface. There are actually 4 RSS-related plugins now: one for a display in the sidebar, one for link elements in the page head, one for generating the RSS 1.0 files, and one for generating the RSS 2.0 files.

I still need to do more with plugin configuration. I'm working on a generic plugin configuration interface, but I need to adapt some of the ad hoc configuration pages I had to work with it (I'm thinking of the sitemap config in particular). I also need to go through and finish adding all the events for plugins to tie into. There's still a lot to be done, especially in terms of documentation, but I'm making progress.