Plugin | Simple Blog - Setup Stage

[crashfellow]

Hey Guys,

Ok so now that i've completed my first plugin i'm not moving on to developing a blog system to insert into GetSimple.

So the first thing i need is a spec for it's use.

The following items are items i consider to be required in the creation of the plugin, please provide any feedback on my ideas or additional features you would like to see.

BLOG
A blog should have the following:

- Post Title
- Creation Date
- Last Updated Date
- Blog Content
- Post author (or allow default author)

CATEGORIES
A blog should allow posts to be categorised.

- Category Name
- Category Description
- Category Creation Date

ADMIN SECTION
- Post Creation/Edits/Delete
- Allow the selection of uploaded files to be included in posts from 'files' section (version 2.0)
- Category Edits / Delete

ADMIN SECTION - Configuration
- Blog Name (if diff to site)
- Full length or short length posts on front page
- Length of short length posts if selected
- Allow comments

COMMENTS
This is an area i have question over due to the spam issue, yes comments are a required part of a blog yes?

Comments have:
- Title
- Text
- Author
- Date

Optional elements:
- Filter all HTML
- Add captcha

EXTRAS
- Add automatic 'lightbox' effect to images within posts
- RSS feed of posts generated on add/edit

Give me some feedback people! i wanna hear what you think The thing to remember here, is this is a CMS not a blog system. The blog is an add-on. It's not to be used as a wordpress replacement (yet )

[webmonkeyukcom]

sounds all good to me, post up a link and I'll be happy to test to give proper feedback

[crashfellow]

This is my planning stage. i don't build something without a proper spec which is why im asking for feedback

[Nijikokun]

Me and Mike have blogs using get simple, you could use us as inspiration -> http://nijikokun.com/

Categories should be optional, A lot of people use tags instead.
Don't do lightbox automatically, make it an option, that would annoy me.
Comments should have email in case want of gravatar support.

You would have to do a multiple login if you were going to do authors, so you'd have to code a bit.

[JWH_Matthew]

I am not sure if you have considered the lack of a user login system (that allows more than 1 user) I have never seem a blog for say that does not have a multiple user login system? (Nor a CMS) I believe you should also add IP address to the comments post, especially if you don't require them to login to post comments.

I would also love to assist you in testing this feature, and giving you some feedback!

Great start though!

[internet54]

If you add comments, it will only slow the system down. The downside to GS is that it doesn't use a system to easily manage it's created files. What happens when you have 100 blog posts? Well, GS will have to open and close 100 files to get information from, then if you add comments, your looking at another 100 files to open a close.

That brings a huge burden to the server and will cause the load to increase. So, if your looking to create the blog, we all need to think out of the box.

[Nijikokun]

If you add comments, it will only slow the system down. The downside to GS is that it doesn't use a system to easily manage it's created files. What happens when you have 100 blog posts? Well, GS will have to open and close 100 files to get information from, then if you add comments, your looking at another 100 files to open a close.

That brings a huge burden to the server and will cause the load to increase. So, if your looking to create the blog, we all need to think out of the box.

He's right, I use MySQL for comments.

[crashfellow]

Good points have been brought up however I do believe there is a solution as there is always solutions. I don't believe we will have to implement SQL as that does away with the concept simple was founded on. Perhaps comments need to be left out of the equasion at this point. However I do believe it's possible. Even if perhaps I need to build a metadata file for each post/comment file which tracks number of comments and things like categories for the post to make searching easier.

[internet54]

^ I agree crash, I just wanted to let you know that even though it's possible, it's not logical if the userbase and blog posts and comments become many.

Here's how you could set it up at best, IMO.

[data/blog] - main folder
[data/blog/posts] - posts folder
[data/blog/comments] - comments folder
[data/blog/index] - index folder which contains the the post and their relative comments.

How to set it up...

When creating a post the index file for that post is created.
post-1

In post-1, it lists the url to the post xml file in the posts folder.
The index file also stores the info of whether or not to publish the post, and additional settings for that blog post and it's comments.

Next, when the blog is published, the user can comment.
When the user comments it create a file in the comments folder like: post-1-1, post-1-2, post-1-3 and so forth. (keeps the naming and referencing simple.
The comment when submitted will be index in the post-1 index file.

I hope you understand that I'm saying the index file is the main driver to push the GS to find the blog post and also it's related comments in an easy manner. It also would store the settings so that the server doesn't have to search through the blog to find the settings and related comments.

I know that's not fool proof, but having it indexed that way will also make it easier to setup rss and maybe even a search mechanism