Blogging Roller

WordCamps need to be GPL too now?

Dave Johnson — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:35:56 +0000

Remkus de Vries: The sixth point is where it get’s tricky however. “People or companies in violation of the WordPress license cannot be accepted as event organizers or sponsors“. Does this mean we have to block out sponsors as Microsoft and the likes? They are clearly not GPL compliant, and don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favor of the GPL license, but this does not sound right to me. Same goes for speakers, what if you have perfect speaker and he or she is willing to help out, but because they work for a company that does not support the GPL they won’t be allowed to come? That can’t be right. I can understand that we should try to get behind the GPL as much as possible whenever a WordCamp event is being organized, but I don’t think it is humanly possible to conduct a background check on all sponsors and speakers.

Wordcamp as the front-line of Wordpress GPL enforcement measures? Weird, but I don't see the problem with Microsoft because, as far as I know, they don't distribute Wordpress code and thus cannot be violating the Wordpress GPL license.

Latest links: AtomPub news round-up edition

Dave Johnson — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:31:13 +0000

I've been in crunch-mode working on a new project, but I've been trying to keep an eye on what's going on the world of Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub as the cool kids call it. Here's a wrap-up of some of the AtomPub news I've picked up on the past month or so.

Specifications

The big news is, of course, that AtomPub has been granted an RFC number RFC-5023 and is now an IETF "proposed standard" like Atom format (RFC-4287). The folks at Ricoh have provided a Japanese translation.

Extensions to AtomPub are under development and you can find a good list of them at the XML Cover Pages page for Atom. One I find interesting is James Snell's AtomPub Feature Discovery spec, which is designed to help AtomPub clients determine what features are supported and required by servers. The features spec is controversial and has sparked a lot of good discussion including, Brian Smith's email Atom Weblog Publishers Guide and Sergey Beryozkin and Dan Diephouse's discussion of AtomPub and WS-Policy

Server implementations

More big news to report here: the new Wordpress 2.3 release provides full support for AtomPub. Sam Ruby blogged about it in Wordpress 2.3 loves AtomPub and the Wordpress 2.3 AtomPub docs provide a good summary and cover some limitations. Yesterday, Sam posted Wordpress vigilance and plans. He wants to get Wordpress to score a perfect 0 errors and 0 warnings on the APE tests, which means among other things preserving foreign markup.

New releases of Apache Roller have also been updated for the final AtomPub spec. The upcoming Roller 3.1.1 and Roller 4.0 releases include AtomPub support. Both releases are up for vote now, so they should be out Real Soon Now. And I'm working on adding AtomPub support for comments for Roller 4.1, building on top of the Atom Threading Extension (RFC-4685).

I've been googling and browsing the SixApart site, but I can't figure out if Movable Type 4.0 supports the final AtomPub spec. Anybody know?

And Google has added another AtomPub based API. Read about it on Bill de hÃ“ra's blog YouTube via GData and on the YouTube Developer API blog: New YouTube API Released into the Wild.

Client implementations

In Stick a fork in it Joe Cheng writes "The Windows Live Writer team is still on track to deliver AtomPub support in the next version, which I am looking forward to immensely. Itâ€™s definitely an exciting time to be in the blogging tools space!" Based on what I saw at the last face-to-face AtomPub interop, it looks like Microsoft may have the best AtomPub-based blog client around. I wonder when MarsEdit and Ecto will get on board with AtomPub.

Toolkits and programming libraries

I already blogged about the Propono 0.6, a Java-based client and server library for AtomPub, which has been updated for final spec. Since then the Apace Abdera project has released Apache Abdera (incubating) 0.3 release is available with a long list of improvements and new features. There are also a couple of usage notes from James Snell. Also on the topic of Abdera, Dan Diephouse has done some work to make Spring and Abdera work well together.

The Perl AtomPub::Client at CPAN has updated for final AtomPub too.

That's all I've got for now. Did I miss any important AtomPub news?

Approaches to blog customization

Dave Johnson — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:29:07 +0000

One of the things that new bloggers tend to complain about is theme customization. It's just too hard to customize the look and feel of your blog. And that's true even if you just want to make a couple of minor tweaks like changing a banner image, changing a background color or adding a "widget" to your sidebar (e.g. a Flickr badge of most recent photos or an RSS listing of recent links from del.icio.us).

With Roller and most other blog servers I've used, you can configure some aspects of your blog's layout and appearance via a web UI with no HTML, CSS or template coding.

With Roller and others, you can configure these things:

Change blog title and description
Configure the number of posts displayed on main page
Change from one stock theme to another
Add links to your blogroll
Add new categories to your blog

For everything else, you must customize, i.e. edit templates and deal with HTML, CSS and a specialized template language. For non-geeks, that can be pretty daunting. How can we improve the situation? We've discussed a couple of alternatives on the roller-dev mailing list and internally at Sun, but sometimes it helps to take a look at how the other guys do things. So I did some research today and in this blog entry, I'll briefly review how several popular blog systems enable blog customization.

Roller

But first, I should explain how Roller enables theme customization. When you create a blog in Roller, you must select a theme. A theme is a set of Velocity templates and resource files (images, CSS, etc.) that generate and style the HTML that makes up your blog. If the theme is updated by your Roller site administrator, then your blog will be updated to match.

If you want to customize your theme, you go to the theme page in the Roller UI and click the customize button. You now have a copy of the templates and resources that define your theme and you can edit them yourself within the Roller UI. Using the Velocity template language, you can access the Roller objects that make up your blog (e.g. blog entries, comments, bookmarks, pages, etc.) via Velocity expressions and you can call Roller specific Velocity macros to generate HTML and other markup based on those objects. You can add as many page templates as you want. Objects and macros are documented in the Template Author Guide (PDF).

Wordpress

Wordpress is not all that different from Roller in the blog customization department. When you create a blog you get one of two predefined themes. A theme is a set of PHP templates and resource files that generate the HTML and CSS files that make up your blog. Using the PHP template language, you can call a set of Wordpress specific Template Tags, which are PHP expressions, to insert information from your blog and to generate commonly used things like a calendar or a category drop-down choose.

One of the top reasons that bloggers want to customize their theme is to add a "widget" or two, e.g. a Flickr badge of most recent photos, an RSS listing of recent links from del.icio.us or a Google search bar. So Automattic, the company founded to support Wordpress, now offers a free Wordpress Widgets plugin. Once installed, you can use a drag-and-drop interface to add components to your blog's sidebar. I haven't installed the plugin myself, so here's a screenshot take from Automattic's site:

Figure 1: Wordpress Widgets configuration

Wordpress has one limitation that is not shared by Roller or Movable Type. Allowing users to edit PHP on a multi-user blog server is not safe -- bad code could potentially bring down the system. So, on the Wordpress.com service users cannot customize their themes. They can pick from a (very nice) set of predefined themes or purchase a Custom CSS option that enables CSS-based customization only (no PHP changes required or allowed).

Movable Type

Movable Type is also pretty similar to Roller when it comes to blog customization. A blog's appearance is defined by a set of template files that use a variety of Movable Type specific Template Tags. Unlike Roller (and Wordpress), Movable Type publishes static files. So, after you make changes to your templates you must rebuild your site. It's easy to start the rebuild via the Movable Type UI, but it could take a little time to rebuild a large site.

Movable Type also support the notion of sidebar widgets which, as you can see below, are very similar to Wordpress Widgets.

Figure 2: Movable Type Sidebar Widgets configuration

Blogger.com

Blogger.com provides about 30 pleasant looking themes for your blog. Each theme is a single template file plus resources (images, CSS, etc.). You can customize your blog by editing your chosen theme's template to change the HTML, CSS and Blogger.com specific Template Tags used.

Live Journal

Unlike the others I've covered, Live Journal steers users away from template editing by proving a much wider range of configuration settings you can apply to your blog. In addition to the settings supported by most blog, you can also:

Pick from a dozen or so layouts
Choose from a dozen or so color themes, choose an ad layout
Set colors and fonts for most parts of your blog page
Set icons for 30 or so items commonly displayed on blogs
Set custom navigation, music and mood text
Add your own custom CSS style sheet

And if you pay extra you can customize your blog's "layers" using the S2 template language, which is used by both Live Journal and FotoBuilder (a photo gallery package).

That's it for now...

In summary, it seems that Roller is not that far off from state-of-the-art when it comes to blog customization but there is plenty of room for improvement. I like the way that Live Journal allows users to configure a blog's look-and-feel without requiring (or precluding) template changes. I also think the idea of a configurable sidebar is good. But I need some more good ideas, so I'll probably take a look at a number of other systems. Any suggestions?