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August 19, 2004

index > tech > notes

Plugin Revisions

Sorting
Moving to a non-hacked blosxom meant making a few plugin changes. There's no real need for a sorting plugin anymore, but I've come to like the idea of switching views. So, sort_order is out (reserved for the hacked blosxom), and sort_by_date is in. Similar operation, but the sort choices are now by date, by file name, or by category name; de/ascending.

Breadcrumbs
crumz needed a big cleanup, and it got one. It offers all the choices you could want for constructing breadcrumbs trails, and it's now error-free ;-)

Entry Formatting
In a fit of ADD, I decided to take blox beyond just being a simple block-tagger, and added some styling. The markup was modeled after the blosxom Kwiki system; its robustness is still up in the air.... The truly undisputed Good Thing in the new blox is that <PRE> blocks are now totally left alone. Don't how things like that are "supposed to be done" in perl, but the simple placeholder method seems like it should work just fine.

To best test blox problems from users, I've enabled styling site-wide; since the bulk of entries are already marked up for things like code, italics, and bold with html, this should be a solid test.... New entries are now generated with blox markup; another gamble ;-)

This new version has had a couple of picky little problems; thanx to mixelmagic on the blosxom list for finding them!

site plugins

Un-hacked blosxom needs lottsa helpers; I'm now using these:

config ó Fletcher's version that runs in head
entriescache ó Fletcher's v0.91, with a mod to the story sub to make meta-tag removal more versatile:
$$body_ref =~ s/^$meta_timestamp.*?\n//gms;
$$body_ref =~ s/^$meta_date.*?\n//gms;
Also added a password to the reindex call, and changed reindexing params in the entries() sub to allow reindexing to be set as 'never' via $delay.
Fletcher's emptymessage v0.3. The stock 404 message was changed to imitate my normal 404 template; a nasty xhtml hack sets the "intro" class display property to none, which allows emptymessage to make flavours look just like the 404 template. The plugin doesn't seem to throw a real 404, so mimicking the 404-redirect templates seems the best course.
fulldatenames ó a little something to make Jan become January

cyclz, seemore, exclude, and flavoudir have been unaffected by going to a straight blosxom.