wafblog v3.0

Ok, I am slowly, but surely, hacksing my way through bBlog. I do rather like this blogging/CMS tool. It’s fairly easy to use and most of the stuff is straight-forward. It uses the Smarty template engine and seems to make a lot of things simpler. At the same time, there’s lots that doesn’t work out of the box.

So far, I have fixed:
- menu bar (which does away with the navi section of the sidebar so that’s heaps good)
- side bar (yeay for icons and general linkage!)

Stuff I’ve half-fixed:
- comments (It’s very brute-ish. Comments containing the words poker, casino and viagra are currently blocked. But! I did manage to find this entry about adding spam protection, so I might try implementing it later)
- the calendar (I removed those stupid arrows that DON’T WORK. I think that they *should* work - but I’m fairly sure it’s my archives.php that’s causing the trouble)
- archives (it shows by month now on the sidebar but no in the actual archives page - again I think it’s the php page)

Things to work on:
- more content for sidebar
- the rss feed (I have no idea what to do about that actually o_O)
- the “Read More” plugin (essentially the same as an LJ cut)
- PhotoBlog (apparently there was a plugin in-the-making but doesn’t seem to have been released and I haven’t had time to look into it)

The main thing holding me back is a general lack of PHP knowledge. I’ve done ASP and some VBScript, but quite frankly it seems completely different to PHP. I’m not sure if it’s just cos I’m looking straight at the PHP files and haven’t properly sat down to understand the syntax but generally languages shouldn’t be too hard to learn. Hrm. I’m not sure if there’s anything else I’d really want to do with my blog. I won’t really have time to look into these things until uni finishes (two more months!) but even then I’m likely to lose interest and just makedo with what I’m using. It’s shame - bBlog seems like a great blogging tool but it seems that all development on it has stopped.

I’ll leave you with something that all programmers can relate to.