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webpad Needs Some Love

webpad has been sorely neglected, and it is starting to show. I have a bad feeling that it won’t work on a default install of PHP anymore, and there are a number of reported bugs related to the install and configuration process which have done anything *but* go away with time. I think it is getting close to time that I need to re-write the core code for little-ole webpad, and try to bring things up to scratch.

There are also a number of improvements I would like to make to the system at the same time, but priority one will be to bring all of the existing code up to a certain level, then move forward to a new version.

And so… the requirements (as far as I am concerned) for version 2.1 public are;

  1. Re-write of backend code to standardize style/syntax etc.
  2. Ensure that all code is 100% compatible with a default installation (no register_globals being the big one here)
  3. Switch all of the Blogger.com operations over to using the new, inbuilt XML-RPC functions in PHP, rather than the external library it currently uses.
  4. Ensure that all Blogger.com operations still work (their API has been all over the place, so who knows??)
  5. Iron out any bugs in the install process to ensure that the app can be installed with a minimum of fuss.

With that out of the way, I will then look towards a 3.0 release, which should look something like this;

  1. Inclusion of ODBC, PostgreSQL and possibly Oracle plug-ins for authentication
  2. Streamlined setup/install and user management (*large* improvements planned)
  3. Improved support for authentication methods other than WIXAS
  4. Much better file management (directory creation, renaming, deleting etc)
  5. Integration with Blogger Pro, Radio and MovableType if possible (expanded to include template management and better post management)
  6. Ability to load a file from the filesystem via direct request (i.e. http://webpad/?file=/path/to/file.txt) assuming permissions allow it and it’s within the user’s home dir.
  7. Much better mult-user support
  8. Commercial licenses will attract a modest fee (in the vicinity of $USD15), while personal use will remain free

Now Working on RESTy Archives

I seem to have sorted out the main code for making blosxom at least pretend to be RESTy, now I am working on the archives system to clean that up. It is largely based on the main code, but needs to take into account the “forced” /archives/ directory when working out relative paths and stuff like that.

Once this is complete, I will then start working on creating some templates for the actual site (coverting my Visio wireframes into real XHTML!).

Calendar Added to RESTxom features

I have added a simple calendar which will be displayed in the place of a @ CALENDAR@ tag in your RESTxom templates (head or foot preferably!)

The calendar will include links to any days which contain posts, and those links will go directly to the archives, where that day will be shown, and you can locate whichever post interests you. I’d like to add support for allowing the browsing of months, but the handling of the 403 errors doesn’t seem to allow that…?

The Silence of the Asilomarians

After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.

I signed up for the IA Library project with AIfIA, and have suggested that perhaps CELIA could be done as a part of that project, but have received no response. Zero. Nada. Zip.

I think Karl and I are going to start planning it out a little, hopefully I will be able to knock together a simple-ish system which can handle the stuff we would be working with, and that would allow us to get started. I think it’s a really valuable thing, and something that perhaps isn’t as important is the US, because IA is more established, but it sure is important here, where I have met all of about 3 people who even took a punt on what Information Architecture is!

Oversight

When I thought I had “finished” the mainline code for RESTxom, I forgot that I hadn’t thoroughly tested the RSS code (allowing you to request rss.xml from any topic and get a correct feed from that point ‘down’). Turns out it doesn’t work properly… double-slashing problems and whatnot, shouldn’t be too hard to fix hopefully, but darned annoying in the meantime.

So off I go to fix the RSS code, then have to fix it in the archives as well (which are working now!)

Putting blosxom to REST

The plan with these helper scripts that I am writing is that blosxom will be able to operate in a “REST-like” environment. This means that directing a browser to a URL like /blogging/blogger.com/ should load the blog entries in that directory (if it is within a defined blog-tree).

It’s working so far, and I have added in the option of linking to ‘rss.xml’ within any directory in the blog-tree to get an RSS feed of that level/category/sub-blog. Sweeeet. Next up is to eliminate the permalinks needing to use the blosxom.pl script in the URL (i.e. so that archives don’t have to link to blosxom.pl at all).

More Projects To Come

The main 2 sections of the site to be completed are the projects (still have some micro-sites to put together here) and the search system. I will also need to bring across the copyright info from the old site, but that will largely be copy/paste. The search system will be the most interesting part to develop, and I have some nice plans for it as well – We’ll see what I can do as far as combining 2 XML documents and an XSLT together (server-side using PHP of course!) to create the results.

The projects really could use a little work, but I just don’t have time to work on them right now. Once the site is live, I will be working on RESTments again to get that going, and then when that is up, the projects will all receive a make-over to ensure that they work with PHP’s register_globals off and magic_quotes_gpc off as well. I will also eventually get to working on new versions of webpad (which I have some great plans for) and AvantBlog (want to make a few versions, so that there is one for each major type if possible.

So now, with no other external contracts to take up my time, it is just a matter of not falling asleep and then all I have to do is my website, should mean that it’s up within a week or 2.

RESTxom Now Has RESTy Archives

I have made it so that the /archives/ directory, from the root of the blog, houses all of the archives for the entire blog, organised by date. It simply parses the dates and then requests the details from blosxom. To sort out the issues related to relative vs. absolute references, I have added in # # #URL# # # (actually no spaces between any of the #’s) to the story template, which is replaced by my scripts with the root of the blog-tree when displaying it.

The only problem with this system at the moment is that I don’t think it’s actually passing the internal page anchor (after the #) when it displays the page, so it might not link down on the page to the specific post… I will have to experiment with this some more.

UPDATED: (about 3 seconds later) — it does load the correct place in the page, so it’s all good!

Changes are afoot

I am re-writing a large proportion of the code which runs RESTxom, to make it more portable and reliable. Also trying to make sure that *everything* works properly, rather than getting any nasty surprises down the line!

Once this is done properly, then RESTments should be pretty simple(?) to add in.