After looking into Blosxom so heavily lately, I’ve decided to scrap the portions of Inklog that I’ve written so far, and start over. Blosxom has been a true inspiration by showing the benefits of using existing infastructure in interesting ways to create an easy to use, flexible, efficient system.
I know what you’re thinking: “another PHP bases Blosxom clone? No, thanks”. But that isn’t the case. Yes, in many ways it is a clone of Blosxom. However, because of the way it is being written, it is much, much more.
The initial release will do less than what Blosxom does now. But, because of the techniques being used in the framework, the weblogging portion will merely be one of the many things Inklog can do. And, because of its modular design and plugin system, anyone can extend it to do even more things. Because of it’s heavy reliance on PHP classes, extending it is as simple as extending the base plugin class and added the pieces you need.
The only thing that may turn people away from it, will be its partial reliance on Smarty. I understand that everyone has their own favorite templating system, and that one size doesn’t always fit all. Therefore, it will be writen flexible enough to accomodate other template systems, however, support classes will have to be written to help the framework interface with the framework. I will most likely not author any of these support classes though, if someone else does, I’ll be happy to host them.
It’s funny how programming works sometimes. Now that inspiration has struck me, I feel like I could code non-stop until the entire framework and weblogging modules were finished. However, I do still have a little bit of a life (and a very attractive girlfriend). If all goes well I should at least have alpha level code by Monday.
Stay tuned.