[pLog-svn] Announcing SoylentX.com powered by a souped up Plog

[Jason King]

> You're welcome :) And congratulations, I think it looks great! I  
> think it's one of the best sites I've seen so far.
>
Thanks!

> What is the aim of the site? Is it some sort of "generic" free  
> blogging site?
>
The site is still learning to fly. Let me see if I can't give it a 
'pitch.' Recipe for SoylentX: Take 2 cups multi-user blogging software, 
add 1cup community features, a pinch of design, stir until all 
ingredients are thoroughly mixed and pour into web 'zine mold. Sprinkle 
liberally with interesting people. Bake at 350 degrees until cultural 
revolution rises. Remove from oven and eat hot.

> About the changes you made, is there anything you think it's worth  
> trying to add to the development version?

Its hard to say. I want to fold some of the most recent work, especially 
caching features and anything that improve performance back into my 
branch of plog. I think then I'll be able to say more. Database sessions 
would be worth including in core. I actually had a little problem there 
that I solved in a really, really kludgy way I'm afraid, but that's for 
another post. I need to put some polish on my extended user profile 
plugin and re-release that. There's lots of little things here and there 
that might be good for the dev version. I had trouble when I installed 
one of the patches that would keep people from overlapping blog names. 
It had to do with tacking a number,userid, onto the mangled blog name, 
for some reason that didn't work for me so instead I just validated the 
name when it was entered and disallowed duplicate names. I think it 
would be nice if there were two names associated with blogs, one would 
serve to identify which blog to serve: the subdomain part, and one would 
actually show up in templates and such: more like a title. That way you 
could have short catchy urls but have them expand to longer names in the 
templates. I didn't implement this feature but its definitely a core 
hack. I changed the way the login works. Now if you login the dashboard 
is integrated with the rest of the "menu" its the default page instead 
of "write and article" also I use a little js driven drop down in the 
upper right corner to switch between blogs. I think this alone makes it 
a whole lot less confusing for your average user. I like it better too 
because there are less 'clicks' involved. But actually the logged in 
state, dashboard and navigation and everything is something that I still 
want to work on. I think what I have is better than the default setup 
for myself and my site's members. I don't know if it would be for 
anybody else or not.

> What features did you add?  How did you get those different feeds 
> categorized as "culture",  "technica", etc? Did you implement some 
> sort of global blog categories?

I, yeah, I hacked it. Its dirty. Tried to make it a plugin but it works 
for when I, as the admin, add a blog, but not when new users sign up. I 
just made sure that instead of only adding "General" as a category that 
I added all those default categories. People can still add their own if 
they want to customize their blog. This could probably use some work, 
definitely on the technical side as its dirty, but I think it needs to 
wait until the conceptual side can catch up. I have to see what my 
people do with it. It's been very educational to switch from my old site 
to this new one. Watching how people use it versus the old one and 
listening to feedback.

>
> One more thing about the changes: is there anything we could do to  
> make the customization work easier in the future? I'd like to hear  
> your opinions on this :)

A lot of what made customization difficult was learning the Plog API. 
I'm by no means an expert but I know how to get around now and I have a 
pretty good idea of how to accomplish what I want. I think one of the 
most valuable things was being able to ask question and get the answers. 
As I've said before better organization of the documentation, I 
know....feel free to jump in and fix it, would help. Sometimes I 
couldn't find something, or worse, didn't know what I was looking for or 
that it even existed. The API Doxygen site was very helpful. I actually 
installed that and generated my own docs but I like using the online one 
better. I'd suggest that you create separate Doxygen docs for each 
version of Plog. Don't pull 1.0 once you put up the newer ones.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with customizing Plog is one that every OS project 
faces. I as the user/developer want to hack the core so I can make Plog 
do exactly what I want it to. BUT I also want to take advantage of 
developments and new versions. How do I do this? (That's rhetorical, but 
if you have any really good suggestions....) I can use SVN and 
diff/merge but I'm not an old hand at this and its very tedious work 
merging code like that. I would love to see a discussion or even 
documentation of the best ways to go about this. One thing that struck 
me after I had completed 99% of the work was I wish I was able to create 
classes that extended core classes rather than hack the core classes. So 
let's say I want to change a couple queries in the 'users.class.php' DAO 
I could create 'users.class.ext.php' and just override or add methods to 
this file instead. That way when I want to upgrade the core I can pretty 
much just overwrite all my old core files. None of my changes will get 
touched and as long as all the interfaces stay the same everything ought 
to work. Its probably not that simple, but at least I would have all my 
custom changes sitting alone in separate files instead of being wrapped 
all up in the core code. This would also make it easier to diff the old 
core version, which is no longer hacked up with mods, with the new 
version since I could really just see what changed in the core and not 
have to worry about every line. This would make customization so much 
easier and less of a headache for developers. I'm not certain how one 
would accomplish this dynamic loading of classes but it would be cool. 
(After rereading this paragraph... YEAH! Think about this. Would be a 
killer technique for OS projects, also maybe call the files .mod or .hack)


Ok, I think I've exhausted everyone's patience at this point so I'll 
sign off.

Best,
Jason