Re: Opinion on pyblosxom

* Francois Granger ([email protected]) wrote:
>  From my "not a good enough programer to help" point of view.

Everyone's a programmer, though it may not be in computers :)

> This email, and your answer raise a nice set of questions. The main
> one being the eternal compatible debate.

Great :)

> I think that it is interesting to have compatible products in an area
> like this one. 

Other may think it's a waste of time, like all OSS projects :)

> And I think that ideally, compatibility has to be defined by a clear
> set of items. There could be a meeting point for the developers of the
> various Blosxom flavors. So that these issues can be openly discussed
> and some basic definitions agreed on.

Is this possible? Especially with all differences in the languages.

> Data level
> A basic set of rules allowing for one to be able to switch engine on
> the same dataset with the minimum problem.
> - Text files
> - html files
> - database for comments
> Then, each developer is free to make a better engine allowing more
> functionality.

Right now, what the Tao of *osxom is, that they share the same text
files for all the implementations. I try to make pyblosxom, at lease a
drop in replacement only down to the base text file level.

When it comes to comments, everyone will have a different idea on where
and how they should be store, for example, in Phosxom, it's an sqlite
database, for blosxom, it's in a perl readable Storable format (or
something like that), and for pyblosxom *drum roll* we may have many,
depending on the user's tastes or the developer's creativity :) Which,
in a way, means that pyblosxom should not really care as long as there
are hooks to access the data. I'm not sure what you mean by html files
(flavours?), but I do try to make it blosxom compatible, though it may
not be variable for variable, for example I devised my own $url (or
something like that that wasn't in the original blosxom 0+5i), then
suddenly, blosxom's $url now is different from pyblosxom's $url. SHould
I follow and break everyone else's pyblosxom installation?

> Protocol level
> A set of minimum requirement for the implemented protocols
> - TrackBack
> - PingBack
> - RSS format....
> This is more on the field of the blogs tools at large than on the 
> Blosxom level.

RSS format is the same as blosxom's default, though if you want to use
RSS 1.0, you need a plugin to get it to work, and for RSS 2.0, we will
need some tools that are not in python to generate the proper ISO8601
timestamps.

> >  *** the first to come out with text formatting options,

It's called preformatters, documented in
http://wiki.subtlehints.net/moin/PyBlosxom_2fExtendingPyBlosxom_2fPreFormatters
and will soon be replaced with plugins so as to make a standard
interface for all plugin like code.

> >  *** the first to come out with flavour overrides based on the
> >      directory you are in,

Not so documented :( and supposed to live at
http://wiki.subtlehints.net/moin/PyBlosxom_2fFeaTures_2fHierarchicalCategories

This was mentioned @
http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom/weblogs/tools/pyblosxom/pyblosxom.0+5i_rev2.html

and to see the effect, you could go to
http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom/thingsTodo/software 

What basically happened was that there are flavour files in the
$datadir/thingsTodo/software, and that overrides the default that was in
the $datadir itself.

> >  *** the first to allow different types of files to render,

Still in CVS, called entryparsers.. It's totally abused at
http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom-src and you can see it in
action at http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom/tests/

Someone could for example drop in a word document, and pyblosxom would
take it and display it as a web page (of course this is provided that I
have the driver for it)

> >  *** the first to allow user defined metadata in entries,

This are your standard

#foo bar

so that you get $foo with the value 'bar'. Documented a bit in the wiki
site, and you yourself used if for quicktopic (remember). Some info @
http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom/weblogs/tools/tutorial/quicktopic.html

> With some short explanations, I would be pleased to document the ones
> I don't know.

Yes, documentation department here is weak, and I'm to blame for it :)

> I am currently adding to the faq I started some sample definition for 
> TrackBack and PingBack, I would be pleased to document the marked *** 
> points above wich I did not knew off until now. 

You are welcomed to touch the wiki site at
http://wiki.subtlehints.net/moin/PyBlosxom you know :)

> And, by the way, I'd like to know how to setup posting through web
> browser.

Two ways, PHPetal and the weblog-add.py available in the contrib section
of the pyblosxom distribution. And really, the best way IMHO is to use
XMLRPC.

> I think that documentation allow more users to come in and more users
> mean more developers (and the other way as well ;-)

I know this. And what's worse, documentation is the hardest part too :)



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