Good, I like this blog system, I want Philipp to open it

nice design that of 2004

Philipp
many people are waiting for the code to go open... :)

I wouldn't mind releasing that but only in a form with a very accessible code base... now the issue with that is that code behind the blog and forum has grown from the time when Blogoscoped was still based on Blogger's FTP export, so by now it would need a rewrite and refactoring to look more standalone and as lightweight as possible. Added to that, right now I'm doing quite a bit straight in the MySQL administration console (or sometimes right in the code), and ideally there should be a real easy (and supported and documented...) management interface for that...

Bah, I'm still in the 90s. And that upstart, mbegin, keeps getting me confused with myself.

I want the code.

Of all blogging engines I tried, both as poster and, now and agan, blogger/ publisher, Philipp's BG is the cleanest/ most accessible/ least trashy one I know of. All the others suffer from featureitis and "blogdogma-rigiditis" in varying degrees. I can only imagine the amount of forethought that went into the design of its many highly unobtrusive, and there-if-needed functions. But I also suspect that it is way too tight, way too intensely tied into how Philipp and Tony, the two webmeisters, work, and want it to work. Were code to be unleashed unto the world at large, it'd first have to be extended considerably, equipped with enough safeguards and bidirectionally conditional controls ("you can do C only if F, N and B have already been done AND IN THAT ORDER") to become, effectively, Yet Another Bloated Blog Engine. You really would want to go down that road, Philipp?

Ian, you pretty much wrap up why I don't want to go down that road :)

Man, can I read yer mind by remote control.

Still, this doesn't preclude potential future development where, faced with in-your-face irrefutable proof of near-constant idleness of your server (=far too much computing power at your disposal as consequence of Moore's law, say) you could develop it into, basically, self-policing by-invitation-only micro-blogging service of sorts. If http://tumblr.com/ can manage it, and with a vast number of tumblelogs, then so should you.

Of course, nothing comes at no-price, but I imagine a suitable extra-pagerankable-content for adminstration-economy-of-scale agreement, or something, could be worked out.

Sometimes, when you want something done right, you have to make it yourself. Problem is, nobody wants exactly what you do. Until the internet inevitably corrects this flawed opinion.

It'd be neat if Philipp and Tony released bits and pieces of their engine into a "Make your own blogging platform" toolkit. That way, you don't have to reach in and rewrite everything to be presentable to the internet code-snobs who will moan "Gawd, ANOTHER blogging platform? Can't you just make a {favorite language} framework like everyone else?"

And then, intermediate programmers (like me) would have an easier time building a lightweight platform that does what they want and nothing else. Philipp and Tony wouldn't have to clean up or rewrite ALL their code, just the most functionally independent parts, at their own pace.

With that said, I have made ENORMOUS assumptions about the nature of their codebase. This plan could be impossible for the reasons stated above or other reasons. I do not wish to malign P & T's ability or intentions for their code. Also, someone may have already done this.

Finally, I'm still in the top 100! Woot!

Maintaining any publicly-released piece of code this large becomes a full-time job. So if you want Philipp to keep blogging, you better not let him take on the maintenance of any released code.

Having said that, the unique integration of the blog and forum would be a good reason to release "yet another blogging platform". I think it would be better for someone to develop a clone from scratch "as a package for release" rather than to try to convert Philipp's software for that purpose.

1. Creating a forum system would take 2 hours in code igniter, assuming of course their won't be any spam checking or user system.
   2. Next it should be possible to give each thread an extra field and if this field is present it should be published as an item in a blog.

Overall this should only take a day to create (without a user system, spam checking, admin area – but all these things aren't present in this system either), even though I would most likely get messed up with the viewer part, but aside from that it should be pretty straightforward.

PS. I think that the table structure in the database is the biggest mess currently with this system, but the code generating the web pages itself should be relatively clean...

PPS. Two things I assumed:
1. That this site was developed in php
2. That everything takes three times as long as you would plan and I would assume that making the core of this system would take 6-8 hours.

1. OK David, your 6-8 hours starts now. I look forward to checking out the result tomorrow. Yes, I'm familiar with code igniter.

2. Yes, this site was developed using PHP.

> without a user system, spam checking, admin area –
> but all these things aren't present in this system either

We do have spam checking and an admin area. And there is a kind of user system that most of you aren't aware of too.

Also, just to clarify something, I don't develop any of the code for this platform; Philipp deals with it all – although I have been known to very occasionally request features.

The hardest part about developing software is often deciding which features to include and how to implement them. Philipp's done a great job designing and developing this blog and forum platform, managing to keep it simple while still including key features that make it different to most other things available.

Having said all that, I think it's relatively easy to copy something that's already been developed. If somebody wanted to copy it, I'm sure something similar could be knocked up by an experienced developer in a few days even though it's taken years for this platform to evolve into what it is today.

Oh... I thought the whole admin area is only the edit field double clicking the # sign.

I finished the whole forum, the editing admin portion, the option to blog about something in the forums, the separator before and after blog post comments, bb parser. Things I still have to do; Blog without a forum discussion, personrank and avatars and I would love to see the code for the youtube and image url parser, as its better then any class or anything I have been able to find/create... Hope to upload some version by tonight... and of course it will be far and far worse then this version. Aside from that I thought something up as to how a forum is changed into a blog post, as I had no idea how its implemented here.

And one think I would like to be clear about, I really understand that it has taken lots of time actually designing this system, but the best thing about this system is the ease of use for the users, even though I seem to recall that Phillip once said that he actually adds and edits something directly through the mysql prompt,

Ok, so I actually had hoped to implement a few more features today, but it took me about two hours to find out; A that my hosting provider doesn't has safe mode enabled AND is using php 4.something B that all php hosting services are crap. C that mamp is crap D that routers are crap and E that xampp kind of rules

Password: demo
double click the # as here for more options
http://82.215.62.200/CodeIgniter/
And the server will go offline most likely at 9:15 tomorrow morning, but that depends...

Quite Good David.

And one last thing, currently to change a forum discussion into a blog post; double click the # right of the title of the discussion and add a blog text.
   Overall I guess it covers the core of this system... even though a lot of work still needs to be done, and most likely I have forgotten various obvious features...

Sorry for double posting, but that's the disadvantage of not being able to edit post. Just wanted to inform you guys that in the (to-be) open source alternative I also implemented person ranks, topic ranks, session names, comment counters and user pages(using google search ajax api) http://82.215.62.200/Blogora/

Blogora is a obviously a combination of blog and the plural of forum, kind of fits the project.

And I forgot to mention rss as well.

I think it's very neat you started this David!

And agreed with some of the former comments. Would I have known how this blog + forum were to develop in terms of feature, it would have been a quicker, more streamlined job. Writing the original blogging software when I moved away from Blogger was in fact something like a single day job (originally!). However, here are some items from the history:

- In the beginning, when I was still exporting posts from Blogger via FTP, I merely added bits and pieces in PHP for which Blogger didn't give me the right tools.
- In the beginning there was no forum, there was not even a site comments functionality, there was just an "email comment" link below posts. Then later on there was a forum but it was not connected to the posts, so when you wanted to comment you were just directed to the forum and had to look if there's an existing thread on the topic.
- The forum itself started out as a standalone app I once wrote that was also used at Findforward, GamesfortheBrain and so on. After a while the demands became more specific so that I decided to treat the Blogoscoped forum on its own merits.
- The blog search engine was Custom Search Engine based and also at a time SOAP API based, before it turned into its current Google REST API + MySQL mix
- The blog pages were once showing static HTML (exported from FTP), then for a time they were showing dynamically straight from the database, then due to server stress for higher traffic posts I created a caching system which now exports all posts as static HTML.
- Some blog posts are on standalone pages while other, shorter posts, share the URL with more shorter posts. Also, old URLs from the Blogger time use a different structure. (There was also a time where I needed to support yet another variant: malformed permalink URLs which the system had been generating for a short while, but which I didn't want to just unsupport, due to them being permalinks.)
- chat was once a more integral part of the forum, showing how many people are in the chat...

The list goes on and on, these were just some examples...

If I would release any of this, what I would do is differently: I would look at the actual general core features Blogoscoped blog + forum has right now, and then design + create the whole thing from scratch (database structure, code etc.). In other words, it would be a complete rewrite. But that probably also means, as David's efforts now show, anyone who feels they want to start such a project from scratch can also try do it.

Things I learned following this discussion:

1. Don't make fun of frameworks as much. I simply suggest that they are no substitute for good programming skills. As I am a novice, I don't want to rely too much on handholding, but I DO appreciate productivity. David Mulder's Blogora was created, with a PHP framework, very quickly. Bravo, sir!

2. A motivated GOOD coder can do great things quickly. With the right skills and tools, building your own whatever is often preferred unless you're already saddled with someone else's patform.

3. Blogoscoped evolved as Philipp's needs changed. Thus, not even the greatest of coding wizards could have made Blogoscoped what it is today because he or she cannot see into the future. For example: what if Google decides to hire Philipp, buy the site and want it all rewritten in Python for BigTable?

Philipp, you wrote:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/146670.html#id146907
"There was also a time where I needed to support yet another variant: malformed permalink URLs which the system had been generating for a short while, but which I didn't want to just unsupport, due to them being permalinks."

Are you talking of what I consider greatest transgression of BG Forum, the by-design broken permalinks when a long comment threat gets explicitly folded? ["the above X posts were made before this-Y was blogged" – makes for broken permalinks to (forum-post+1 to Y-1?) posts.]

Very, very impressive, David.

Here is my promised repost, of thus permalinkable first comment (or was it a BLOG post? couldn't tell) regarding the, and @Blogora:
http://82.215.62.200/Blogora/index.php/blog/id/14

It's certainly "clean enough" for the amount of time you claimed, and almost lived up to!, it would take. Far as I can judge posting this from a Palm PDA – in a styleless/ though not Javascriptless/ environment of my choice – is that your engine may rely a whole lot more on AJAX-y calls, than does Philipp's. For instance, by you advertised #-doubleclick switch (if I got that correctly) between a blogpost and a comment/ forumpost is merely an ASCII "#" in my case; while it works admirably as unobtrusive permalink-holder (and, perhaps, more besides) in Blogoforum.

Because I am not sure how long this Blogora-instance will be up, this will be reposted in the appropriate thread of BGF.

[ In addition, I'm not entirely sure where did I miss the id-account bit... all I only ever saw there was the passwd dialog.

I trust that you'll take the extra time to document it FULLY, and in such SIMPLE LANGUAGE, that, say, George W. Bush wouldn't have any probs whatsoever installing it and running in the basement of his presidential library. Consider him stoopid for once, for future wellbeing of this project!]

I'm watching with interest!

> Are you talking of what I consider greatest transgression
> of BG Forum

Sorry no, I wasn't even talking about that issue :)
(The issue I referred to is fixed by now...)

As Roger, I'll watch Blogora with great interest :)

ianf: It will be up every night and during the weekend – once I get the mac control part neat and tidy inside my router :(- and there isn't a single piece of ajax in it (only client side code for javascript double click link on the #).

So the # thing is the same as double clicking the date on the blogoscoped forum (which never made sense to me) and the ⎆ (enter) sign is the forum->blog item switch.

Aside from that I won't be able to do any work on cleaning the code this week, due to both personal and study issues :(And I have to figure out as well how config files and lang files should look like in codeigniter.

philipp: The great thing about you releasing the mess of the code for the current forum is to check out things like the parser and probably other small functions.

David, you could email me if you like to see or discuss certain functions/ functionality...

(On a side note, would you mind removing my name from the Blogora test install as I didn't write those comments? I know you just did this for testing but might be confusing...)

David Mulder – I can't really get over the speed with which you implemented a working BG copycat of sorts, the Blogora. When Roger Browne challenged you to make good on your promise of a few hours' engineering, I took it as a joke, as I believe did the challenger. Yet you came through with it, perhaps not in the exact stipulated timeframe, but close enough.

So how did you do it/ what made you select PHP and that particular dev. framework, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeIgniter /
and not, say, one of the countless other, each one better than the rest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

Earlier you said, among other things:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/146670.html#id146842
> 1. Creating a forum system would take 2 hours in code igniter, assuming of course there won't be any spam checking or user system.

> 2. Next it should be possible to give each thread an extra field and if this field is present it should be published as an item in a blog

When you have the time, would you mind writing a philosophical kind of account on how you analyzed the problem in detail, how you settled on a solution, and what made you pick up just these tools – I assume you to be familiar with more than this one – so that Coders of A Lesser Sort such as meself can at least begin to accept that that collosal Drupal project of last year was doomed to fail from the start ;-((

Better still, make it a part of Blogora docs, thanks.

(so interesting debate here, nice and very interesting)

Updates have stopped??
We are watching the thread with a great interest...

I didnt have internet for the last week, (holiday and stuff (work as well, it all goes together))... so I have created a lot of new features, including a extremely exciting one in my opinion (automated reaction notifications), two more things I still need to do before I will publish a alpha version (get a single regex right, only need to check the right documentation and get the ip logging right which I cant check without internet connection, as it locally only gives me a 0.0.0.0 ip)

So sorry for the huge delay and no updates, but as I said in the very beginning; I actually didnt have time to make blogora at all, so here is a new feature list:
   – coloured topic and person ranks
   – automated reaction notifications
   – mathematical captchas
   – form validation implemented
   – caching (primarly done by the framework)
   – users are stored in database seperataly making public personal messages possible (will disable this in the first version, as it seems to be more work then I expected it to be...)

Overall I believe I may release an alpha version tomorrow after midnight during a lan party I am not interested in, but if you want to test it you will need a running codeigniter framework, which sometimes is a **** in the *** if you have a hosting provider with strange settings... (like me)

This should be it, but as I always tend to do, I am absolutely certain that I will write a new message in a second concerning this message, even though I read through this one three times...