GS Blog v1.4

[mikeh]

Took a while for me to get out of my settled ways with I18N Special Pages and try this thing out properly. Surprised to see that it is doing most of the right things and ticking the right boxes, so very good stuff mikeh :-)

Ups

• Incredibly simple to set up (principle philosophy of GS!) - it actually shocked me how easily features were to enable
  
• Good integration of external comments system Disqus among other features
  
• Decent degree of customisation for early stages
  
• Lots of potential, especially with the possibility of custom-fields in the next iteration 1.2
  

Downs / areas to improve/be careful of...

• The pretty url system needs to be pretty solid when it is complete, especially regarding the Disqus comments system. If it doesn't treat the separate news articles separately enough in their URL location then the commenting system could face some ugly problems in the long run with comments running into the wrong article(s)
  
• Databases - if you are going to do this, please consider n00dle's Matrix plugin which uses an XML database instead (but provides all of the features of a MySQL database; all within the confines of the GS admin panel!). One considerable appeal of GS is its flatfile nature, so it'd be good if the (potentially) most complete blogging system of GS conformed to that ideal
  
• May want to proof-read a few pages - under 'Post Option' on the post's creation page for example, the label 'Slug/URL' can be seen where it should say 'Creation Date', and on the same page 'separate' has been spelt with two 'a's - cleaning up minor mistakes like these will just make it look more professional
  
• This may be an inevitability with the coming of custom-fields, but just to be sure: will there be a 'template' feature wherein the output/css of the blog can be configured to the user's liking?
  
• I don't think that placeholders work - so any content that users previously had within (% %) tags will not be viewed correctly.
  

Don't let this list get in the way of the pieces you are already tackling. You're doing an awesome and very appreciated job already mikeh, so I hope this completed module receives its accolades. :-)

Thank you for your input. I have incorporated some of your changes into the newest version (pretty urls and label fixes).

In terms of the commenting system. Disqus identifies a blog post by the post's slug. That way it doesn't matter what URL structure the user has or if they change it.

For now I added a text box in the settings panel (as well as on/off switch) to display css for the blog.