Blosphemy

Sun 19 Aug 2007

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I've been trying out a few of my blosxom wishlist ideas over the last few days, and have now got an experimental version of blosxom I'm calling blosphemy (Gr. to speak against, to speak evil of).

It supports the following features over current blosxom:

  • loads the main blosxom config from an external config file (e.g. blosxom.conf) rather than from inline in blosxom.cgi. This is similar to what is currently done in the debian blosxom package.

  • supports loading the list of plugins to use from an external config file (e.g. plugins.conf) rather than deriving it by walking the plugin directory (but falls back to current behaviour for backwards compatibility).

  • uses standard perl @INC to load blosxom plugins, instead of hardcoding the blosxom plugin directory. This allows blosxom to support CPAN blosxom plugins as well as stock $plugin_dir ones.

  • uses a multi-value $plugin_path instead of a single value $plugin_dir to search for plugins. The intention with this is to allow, for instance, standard plugins to reside in /var/www/blosxom/plugins, but to allow the user to add their own or modify existing ones by copying them to (say) $HOME/blosxom/plugins.

These changes isolate blosxom configuration from the cgi and plugin directories (configs can live in e.g. $HOME/blosxom/config for tarball/home directory installs, or /etc/blosxom for package installs), allowing nice clean upgrades. I've been upgrading using RPMs while developing, and the RPM upgrades are now working really smoothly.

If anyone would like to try it out, releases are at:

I've tried to keep the changes fairly minimalist and clean, so that some or all of them can be migrated upstream easily if desired. They should also be pretty much fully backward compatible with the current blosxom.

Comments and feedback welcome.

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