GNO Suzuki Forum website and blosxom

[dragoness_e]

I just finished a website upgrade--I used blosxom  to implement a dynamic Events page and a Calendar page at the GNO Suzuki Forum website.  I'd always had those pages, but I statically edited, rendered and uploaded them every month when the monthly newsletter came out.  Now, with blosxom, I can just upload news articles and calendar items as small text files, and the blogging scripts will handle the rest.  Yes, there are things I want to improve:

 

1. I want the footers to reflect the date rendered, or possibly the date something was last uploaded.
   
2. The Calendar page header ought to describe the actual period shown on the calendar, not what it was when I initially uploaded it.
3. Events page needs to connect with the old event articles, and I need to add an archive page.
4. Add a "Powered by blosxom" tag to the footer.
5. Tweak: Events page needs better styling.

I first heard about blosxom from an article in the Linux Journal; it's an elegantly simple blogging program. Read that article for a good overview.  It's a very small Perl script, with the capacity for massive expansion and customization using plugins (also Perl scripts).   A lot of plugins are available from the blosxom website. Others are scattered about the web on the author's website, such as the nice set of plugins from Enilnomi.net.  (Note: if you use the 'config' plugin, be sure and use Fletcher Thompson's modified 'config', not the original from the blosxom website. His version fixes a problem in that the original 'config' did not search for additional 'config' files until header(), which is too late for custom configuring any filter() hacks you are using.

The GNO Suzuki Forum Events Page uses the following plugins: blox, config, flavourdir, permtimez, moreentries, onlyonedir, sort_order and a customized configuration plugin, htmlppvars.  htmlppvars simply holds stock configuration variables used by the original htmlpp templates in rendering those pages. The variables could just as easily be set up in the config plugin.

The GNO Suzuki Forum Calendar uses the above plugins plus a custom plugin I wrote: future_dayz.  I wanted something that would show only articles from M days before 'now'  to N days after 'now', and there was nothing quite like that.  I originally started out trying to alter Stu Mackenzie's num_dayz plugin, but concluded that it would be easier to write my own simpler, dedicated plugin. So I did.

I am planning to re-implement the Dragoness Eclectic's Lair updates page and the  Rath Nathrach updates page using blosxom, sooner or later.