Gregarius - Devlog

I was kindly asked to post a bit more and keep you guys updated on what is going on behind the scenes of the fancy Gregarius development world. So here is what you should expect will be in the next release, which will probably be released as 0.6.0 - codename [suggest a fancy codename here]

• Multi User Support

  This is probably the single most requested feature, e.g. being able to have several users, each one having his/her own set of feeds and playing a distinct role (Admin, User, Visitor), … everything happily running off a single installation.

  Now, the reasons why this hasn’t been done before are rather simple: 99% of the current Gregarius users won’t need this feature, and it’ll require a huge refactoring both of the code and the database schema.

  Nevertheless, we think it’s a necessary step on the road to TWD and have started discussing the design.

  Database Gurus willing to lend a hand, please contact your nearest Gregarius developer.

• Better Localization

  We’re currently migrating from an clunky, label-files-based localization system to a more modern gettext-powered l10n engine. We’ve picked the excellent PHP-gettext library, which is also used by WordPress, among others.

  Still, it’s a tedious and repetitive search-and-replace work, which I hope to finish as soon as possible.

• New RSS Parser?

  We’ve started evaluating SimplePie as a drop-in replacement of the aging MagpieRSS, whose Atom 1.0 support isn’t quite there yet.

  Although still in beta phase, SimplePie looks quite sexy and well designed.

In a nutshell, these should be the most interesting new features in the next release. We’re still in the design phase, so you still got plenty of time to suggest killer-features you would like to see included, before 0.6.0 goes gold :)

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!!

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:

• New window plugin: when activated, this plugin will make off-site links open in a new window

• 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.

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:

• Won’t be fetched anymore when you update your feeds

• Won’t show up on the feed side-column

Existing items from deprecated feeds:

• Won’t show up on the front page

• Will still be visible when accessed from a search-engine (e.g. via a direct hit on the item’s permalink)

• Will still be returned by the search function

In other words: the content is there, it’s just hidden!

For those of you who have hundred of feeds in your Gregarius feedroll, I’ve added a little form to the front page (it doesn’t really make sense elsewhere, does it?) that will toggle showing of read items on and off.

It basically overrides the behavior of the rss.output.noreaditems configuration entry, and is cookie-based, e.g. it will remember your settings.

As usual for experimental features, you’ll have to dare and update from CVS to give it a try.

Update: as Lycos said, this makes sense in the channel- and folder-views as well. Made it so.