Google Blogoscoped

Monday, January 5, 2009

Blogora, Blog + Forum Platform, Released as Alpha

David Mulder just Alpha-released Blogora, “a project to create a blogging platform tightly integrated with a forum”... and a project spun off by looking at how the Blogoscoped blog and forum functions.

A bit of a back story: You might have noticed that Blogoscoped is both a blog and a forum, and that there’s some integration between the two parts. For instance, sometimes a forum thread will later on also be blogged, in the case of which you’ll see something like “12 + 8” comments (meaning that 12 comments were made before, and 8 after this was blogged). Sometimes there were questions on whether the whole Blogoscoped code could be released as open source, and while I have many open source projects around there was one obstacle with this – I would basically have to rewrite large parts to turn it into a neat module manageable for anyone (managing not by jumping into a specific SQL table or code line like I do when I want to tweak X or Y to get a certain result, knowing where to look), including the task of locating and removing those parts which are too specific to this site to be of general use in other contexts.*

Now David took on him the job to start craft the core platform ideas of Blogoscoped, and a bunch of features not available here, into a completely new, open source framework called Blogora. Using CodeIgniter as web app development framework, David reached fast early results. He is looking for help on this project, so you might want to reach out to him if you’re interested.

*The code base has grown from the times back when these were just helper scripts to fill in holes with Google’s Blogger – Blogoscoped in the beginning was based on Blogger, using FTP export, and had neither comments nor forum... nor a master plan for what the whole thing would one day look like, which turns out and continues to be a step-by-step evolution over the years based on lots of feedback and using it. Blogoscoped features come and go and are often starting out as experiments, like chat room integration**, YouTube player integration, showing country flags based on member IP, pulling comments from backlinks into threads as a kind of trackback, nofollow “rot,” ads in RSS, automated profile pages without registration and things like that. (The site search alone went through mulitple iterations, being based on things like Google’s SOAP API or the Google Custom Search Engine before, and now a mix of the Google REST API and MySQL.)

**On that note, the chat is open source...

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