Gregarius - Devlog

Marco has kindly allowed me to post on this devlog about the slider plugin and a Lilina-like compact theme that I recently put on the repositories.

I wanted a way to control the amount of each item that was displayed so I wrote the slider plugin. You can shrink all the displayed items down to their titles, or you expand them all out fully or you can set it so that only a few lines are displayed. The nice thing is that this setting is stored in a cookie and Gregarius remembers the setting when you move to another page or if you visit the site later using the same browser. You can also expand out a single item by simply hovering over it with your mouse for around 1 second. You would need to use a recent subversion snapshot or one of the nightlies to use this plugin. It is possible to use it with version 0.5.2 if you apply this one line patch.

The lilina theme is to attempt to mimic the interface of the Lilina aggregator. It is quite compact and allows you to scan a large number of feed titles and expand out (by clicking on the titles) only those items you are interested in reading. It also allows you to collapse the sidemenu so that you do not waste precious browser space. I am still working on this theme, so suggestions, ideas and comments are welcome.

Gregarius is easily extensible via plugins and themes and follows the wordpress model quite closely. The theme engine is quite powerful and will let you create almost any interface you would want to. A good starting point is the Plugin Authoring and the Theme Authoring documents on the wiki. If you get stuck, help is always available on the forums or on the dev-mailing list. Good luck!!

Thanks to a patch James submitted, Gregarius just got podcasting support!

If you would like to give it a try, help yourself to a nightly build or update your Subversion tree, and you’ll probably want to install the player plugin, which you can download from the plugin repository.

Once again, despite the apparent calm on the devlog, quite some interesting stuff is going on behind the scenes!

• We’re getting close to the 0.5.2 release: the last bugs have been fixed and lots of new features have been added. Here is the complete list of what you can expect in 0.5.2!

• If you would like to play with the new features but don’t feel comfortable with Subversion you could download a nightly release. These are automatic builds generated by pulling the latest version from the Subversion repository once a day.

• With the invaluable help of Sameer and Martey the Gregarius documentation is being moved to the Gregarius Wiki. Have a look around and feel free to edit Wiki articles yourself if you spot any mistakes or would like to add new documents!

• Last but not least, we’ve just launched the Gregarius Forums. This is the preferred way to ask for support: if you need help or would like to ask a question feel free to sign up and voice your opinion.

Despite the apparent quiet on this devlog, lots of exciting things have been going on behind the scenes in the Gregarius development community!

First of all, a new development mailing list has been created, which is the perfect place for the community to discuss Gregarius bugs and possible new feature ideas to implement.

If you are running the CVS Subversion version of Gregarius (currently at version 0.4.3), or simply because you are curious about what is going on behind the scenes, you are more than encouraged to join us by subscribing to the mailing list.

Another point worth mentioning is that the Gregarius development trunk has been migrated from the sourceforge.net CVS-based repository to the slicker Subversion version control system!

Several reasons have motivated this choice, but the most important are sourceforge’s very annoying one-day lag between the developer- and the anonymous-CVS, and that Subversion is tightly integrated with the wonderful trac project management system.

So, the main Gregarius source repository is now being hosted on svn.gregarius.net. The service is kindly offered by Lycos (no, not that other Lycos, despite the fact that recently search-engine companies have been flirting with blogging/syndication services *hint, hint*)

Anyway, up-to-date information on the Gregarius development path can be found the on the project timeline page, and details on known bugs and open feature requests are available on the Active Tickets page.

Everyone is invited to report new bugs and feature requests and share their experiences on the public Wiki.

If you are interested to run the development version of Gregarius, make sure that the Subversion client is installed (download page) on your web server, then check out the current trunk:

svn co http://svn.gregarius.net/svn/trunk/rss

If you already have a working copy of Gregarius, either a release or a CVS version, follow the steps described in our Cvs To Svn migration guide.

You can use the excellent LiveLines Firefox extension to add feeds to your Gregarius feedroll simply by clicking the RSS icon on the bottom right of your browser window.

Configure the extension as depicted in the above screenshot, and replace the “Subscription URL” with the URL to your Gregarius installation:

http://yourserver.com/rss/admin/sub/^U

Note: this subscription scheme uses a new mod_rewrite rule. If you aren’t running the CVS version of Gregarius make sure you replace your .htaccess file with the latest version.