Re: tbpy plugin idea

Hi there, Lance.

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 04:18, Lance Weber wrote:
> I've gotten basic trackback functionality working on my blog via tbpy.
> http://www.alfheimstudios.com/blog/blogspace/trackback.html

Nice, I've always wanted to do something with tbpy in the past

> As I state in the above post, I'd really like tighter integration 
> between pyblosxom and tbpy, especially for accessing and managing the tb 
> entries, so here's some ideas for a tbpyb plugin:
>    * Returns a count of trackbacks for the current entry
>    * Exposes the rss trackbacks for the current entry as xml and html
>    * Stores config variables for tbpy settings like url, data dir for 
> embedding the RDF entries in your flav templates and accessing the rss 
> tbpy files.
> 
> I have a couple of questions for the group before I charge down this path:
> 1) Has this already been done? Is this a desirable featureset to the 
> group at large?

Yes and no, no as in we have not done anything on tbpy. Yes as in the
functionality is somewhat mirrored in the comments plugin suite that is
included with the pyblosxom distribution. Ted Leung started this by
looking at tbpy first, though not copying the code at all (Ted, am I
right?). I do rather call the comments plugin a feedback plugin instead
because it handles more than comments. Here's a list of features:

 * Integrated with pyblosxom
 * Designed with pyblosxom in mind
 * Keeps entries as RSS item in a seperate file
 * Trackbacks
 * Pingbacks
 * CommentAPI
 * Standard form comments
 * And as a feature: Not easy to install ;)

> 2) The complexity appears to be low enough for "My First Python 
> Project", as I'm just going to be reading some rss/xml files in the tbpy 
> data directory and generating html from them. True?

Yeah, almost true. Complexity really depends on how you read the xml
data, deriving useful information from it. I believe that reading XML
data as is can be slow, especially when doing simple things like
counting the number of comments in an entry. Which is why the comment
plugin stores every comment in a different file based on timestamps.
Easier to count that way, and need not worry about metadata in the RSS
that tbpy produces.

> 3) Am I missing some critical design/architecture flaw in this premise?

Not that I know of.

> Any feedback appreciated! --L

Sorry to reply this late that you have to resend :)



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