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Blog plugin
I'm in the process of writing a basic blog/journal/diary (whatever Crazy) plugin. Here are the features already included:

1) let users set individual entries as private
2) users may optionally disable all public viewing
3) modify/remove entries

if anyone has any feature requests, I'd like to hear 'em.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [fuzzy logic] Blog plugin In reply to
Awesome! Here's what I'd love to see:

Trackback and ping (i.e., ping weblogs.com when an entry is posted).

Ability to have both a main blog page for each blog and to assign specific entries to specific Links categories.

Ability to use Gossamer Forum as the backend for comments on blog entries - One of the things that makes forum software a lot more powerful than the commenting module in LSQL (or, for that matter, Movable Type) for building a community is stuff such as e-mail notification of responses to comments.

I'm no programmer, so I can't help with any of this, but I'll be rooting you on! I'm currently building a community site with Drupal, which is a powerful PHP app, but I keep wishing it were as easy to set up and extend as Links SQL or GForum.

Last edited by:

agaffin: Mar 28, 2004, 3:47 PM
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
Quote:
Trackback and ping

I'm looking into the example implementation provided by MoveableType.

Quote:
Ability to have both a main blog page for each blog and to assign specific entries to specific Links categories.

That should be do-able without much trouble. Should all entries belong to a category, or should a category only be selected if the form is called from inside a category?

Quote:
Ability to use Gossamer Forum as the backend for comments on blog entries
Unfortunately, I don't have GForum so I don't have the means to develope any integration with it. Besides, I'm sort of still learning Links SQL... but maybe in a version 2 release.

I'll post a link to a demo soon.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [fuzzy logic] Blog plugin In reply to
In Reply To:
That should be do-able without much trouble. Should all entries belong to a category, or should a category only be selected if the form is called from inside a category?

Good question! Although ideally every entry should have a category, I guess you need a sort of non-category category for entries that don't really fit anywhere (say a note about the system). For blogging purposes, it might make sense to have a single "blog" interface, sort of like the generic "add a link" form, for entering items, rather than having somebody go into a category and add an item and then marking it as "blog" (apologies if I'm misunderstanding, though!).

Oh, another cool feature would be a bookmarklet that lets you blog something directly from the source, rather than making you cut and paste stuff like the URL from the source into another browser window open to LSQL. That, at least, I can help you with - I already have generic bookmarklet for LSQL.
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
I got pinging to work with weblogs.com using LWP::UserAgent and their GET form. I didn't have any luck at all using XMLRPC::Lite or SOAP::Lite. Partly because I don't have those modules in my Perl installation, and they didn't want to work properly by "require"-ing them from a local directory. It doesn't help either that while they tell you what format the code needs to be in, they don't show you how to produce it using the modules... and the manpages are quite indecipherable if you have no prior knowledge of how those modules work.

What other servers should be pinged? (seems that weblogs.com only lets you ping twice per hour, btw) I'm thinking I'll include a textarea field in the plugins area that can be used for this.

I think it would be fine for entries to simply not belong to any category by default, but could be selected via a pulldown list (with the refering category pre-selected, but changeable). I guess that brings up another question. Should categories include top level categories and thier children, or only top level categories? It would really suck in large directories to have a select list with hundreds/thousands of categories.

I don't think I understand what the bookmarklet does. If you can show me an example that'd be super.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [fuzzy logic] Blog plugin In reply to
hm... actually looks like a I got it working with the XML-RPC method using a combination of LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [fuzzy logic] Blog plugin In reply to
Cool!

Another site to ping is blo.gs, in the form:

http://ping.blo.gs/?name=example&url=http://example.com/

where "example" is the site name (not sure how it handles a site with spaces, maybe with a plus sign?) and example.com is the URL.

As for bookmarklets, I've set one up at
http://www.wickedgood.info/bookmarklet.html

You'll find a single link there. Drag it to your Links toolbar (in IE, at any rate, I haven't tested it in Mozilla). Go to some site. Highlight some text you might use as a description for the site. Now click on the bookmarklet on your toolbar. What you should get is a pop-up LSQL add-a-link form for my site with the URL and the description filled out.
It's not perfect - it won't work on framed sites or sites with JavaScript errors, but I've found it more convenient than cutting and pasting between browser windows when adding a site I want to add to my directory.
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
Just a little update here...

I'm in the process of adding Trackback to the plugin. It took a bit of studying Movable Type's standalone program before it made any sense what was going on.

The Bookmarklet idea is nice. What I'm planning on doing is adding auto-discovery for the trackback url. basicly, the bookmarklet will first scan the page for embedded RSS data, and present that to you. You can then select the post from the list, and fill in the appropriate pinging fields for when you submit your post entry for adding to your blog. If no RSS data is found, you'll just go strait to the form where you'll have to enter that info on your own (usually listed on the "trackback" popup window on most blogs).

I'm hoping I can have a demo you can play with with trackback enabled on it sometime this week. In the meantime, however, you can try it with only weblogs.com.

http://www.perlmad.net/...ser&user=perlkid

The link above is for my test blog, but feel free to create your own account to play around with (since you can't add/edit/delete my posts). When you make posts, weblogs.com will be pinged, so look for "Username's Blog" (ie, "perlkid's Blog") in their listings after making a post. (note that they only allow one ping per half-hour)

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [fuzzy logic] Blog plugin In reply to
Nice! So every editor/user can have his own blog, which is also cool (and would encourage me to install HTMLarea for our folks who don't like hand-coding hyperlinks).

If you do have multiple editors, a cool thing would be to have a "recent postings" page that aggregates postings and then displays them in reverse-chron order - could that be done via a global with the right database query?
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
yes, if blog.cgi is called without any parameters that call special functions, then you'll just go to the main page

You'll then have:
a) partial postings for the last "x" posts

b) text links for the last "x" posts (excluding the the posts that are being displayed)

c) text links to user's blogs who have posted in the post "x" minutes/hours, or whatever...

well, that is when I get around to adding that. Cool

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
I suppose I could make it an option that only the administrator and editors have blog accounts, with normal users only being allowed to view or "maybe" leave a comment.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.
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Re: [agaffin] Blog plugin In reply to
GT has committed to begin developing a plugin for GForum for a blog/CMS. Original thoughts were to use LSQL+GForum, but they have reconsidered and are doing it all in GFourm.....with the exception of using GList for an added multiconditional subscription system with the blog.

We are anticipating the launch at the beginning of May '04.

The major change to GF will be adding a post approval (by moderator/admin) system to certain forums/categories.

Dave
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Re: [bretzke] Blog plugin In reply to
that's bound to be in the $150 or higher price range, for sure. I"m doing this on a much smaller scale with a price point of no higher than $75, and for use with just Links SQL. Any tie-in's with GForum are not likely as I don't have the resources or know-how to develope anything for GForum yet.

Anyway, nothing wrong with having multiple plugins serving the same purpose.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.