Archive for May, 2005
Plugin writing documentation
I’ve written the first draft of the Gregarius Plugin writing guidelines document.
I’m not a great documentation author, thus any comments on content and/or spelling mistakes are more than welcome :)
Posted by Marco at May 21st 2005, 2:11 pm | Filed under: docs, gregarius | No Comments
Gregarius 0.4.2
Gregarius 0.4.2 was just released, and is available from the sourceforge.net download page.
Complete changelog since 0.4.0:
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New plugin engine and plugin manager
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New theme switcher
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Automated upgrade/installation process: database schema auto-update
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Items updating
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Many, many minor bugs fixed
Posted by Marco at May 20th 2005, 12:21 pm | Filed under: releases, gregarius | 7 Comments
Plugins!
I’ve implemented a plugin engine, loosely based on WordPress‘ plugin model, which should allow for simple “plug’n'play” addition of new Gregarius features!
Plugins are simple php files that can be dropped in the /plugins/ folder of your Gregarius installation, then activated in the configuration section.
Currently, Gregarius is shipped with the following plugins:
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New window plugin: when activated, this plugin will make off-site links open in a new window
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Url filter plugin: will turn URLs in your items into actual links
I’ll provide documentation on plugin-authoring as soon as possible, and will eventually set up a repository for third-party plugins.
Posted by Marco at May 14th 2005, 6:44 pm | Filed under: features, gregarius | 1 Comment
Theme picker
A theme-picker feature has been on my short-term TODO list for quite some time now… so here goes!
You can now customize (to an extent) the look and feel of Gregarius by creating your own CSS-based theme, which can be easily packaged and dropped into the /css/ directory, then selected from the Configuration section of your Gregarius Administration area.
Gregarius mini-themeing-tutorial:
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Go to the /css/ directory and copy the “
default” folder to anything you want. Lets say “my_theme“, for example. -
The “
my_theme” directory should contain two CSS files:look.cssandlayout.css. -
Use those files as a base to create your own (better-looking) design.
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In the Configuration section of your Administration area edit the
rss.output.themekey and pick “my_theme” from the list. -
if you feel so inclined, send me a copy of your theme for inclusion in the official package
Oh, you’ll also have to update from CVS and play some SQL-tricks if you wanna give it a try before 0.4.2 is released (anytime soon):
insert into config values (’rss.output.theme’, ‘default’, ‘default’, ’string’, ‘The CSS theme to use’, null)
Posted by Marco at May 10th 2005, 4:23 pm | Filed under: features, gregarius | 2 Comments
Deprecating feeds
If you have your Gregarius publicly accessible from the Internet and indexed by Google, you could find yourself in a situation where you want to delete a feed you have been fetching, but don’t want visitors from search engines to get a nasty 404 error when they hit an item whose feed has been deleted.
For situations like these I’ve added a new feature which allows you to deprecate a feed of your feed-roll.
Deprecated feeds:
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Won’t be fetched anymore when you update your feeds
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Won’t show up on the feed side-column
Existing items from deprecated feeds:
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Won’t show up on the front page
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Will still be visible when accessed from a search-engine (e.g. via a direct hit on the item’s permalink)
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Will still be returned by the search function
In other words: the content is there, it’s just hidden!
Posted by Marco at May 9th 2005, 7:32 pm | Filed under: features, gregarius | 1 Comment
Private, Sticky Items
These days I’ve been pretty busy working on advanced items states, but let me explain.
Until now, an item from an RSS feed had a simple binary state: it was either read or unread. I just extended this to support two additional states, namely:
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Sticky: an item with the Sticky flag set will never be deleted when you prune items, unless you explicitly specify it. This is useful when you want to clean your database but would like to keep a set of items that specifically interest you, say.
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Private: a private item will simply be invisible to the visitors of your Gregarius installation: basically only you get to see private items!
In fact you probably won’t set the private flag on individual news items, but rather on a whole RSS feed (which is done in the feed management section of your Gregarius’ administration area.) Setting the private flag on a feed will set this flag on all past, present and future items of that feed; removing the private flag from a feed will set all the items of that feed to be public again.
How are these flags set on items you ask? Well, its rather trivial:
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When you log into the administration area of your Gregarius installation you are given a cookie, which will identify you as an administrator (and will grant you the right to see private items!)
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When you come back to the content sections of your Gregarius installation you will notice a new edit icon (
) next to you items’ permalink icons. -
Clicking that very icon will expand a tiny inline dialog, where you can toggle the item flags.
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When you are done setting flags clicking ‘OK’ will post you edits back to the server via AJAX and collapse the dialog.
Update from CVS to give it a try, or wait for Gregarius 0.4.2, which I was hoping to release this weekend.