'entries_timestamp' blosxom plugin

I've tried all three of the current blosxom 'entries' plugins on my blog in the last few months: entries_cache_meta, entries_cache, and the original entries_index.

entries_cache_meta is pretty nice, but it doesn't work in static mode, and its method of capturing the modification date as metadata didn't quite work how I wanted. I had similar problems with the entries_cache metadata features, and its caching and reindexing didn't seem to work reliably for me. entries_index is the simplest of the three, and offers no caching features, but it's pretty dense code, and didn't offer the killer feature I was after: the ability to easily update and maintain the publication timestamps it was indexing.

Thus entries_timestamp is born.

entries_timestamp is based on Rael's entries_index, and like it offers no caching facilites (at least currently). Its main point of difference from entries_index is that it maintains two sets of creation timestamps for each post - a machine-friendly one (a gmtime timestamp) and a human-friendly one (a timestamp string).

In normal use blosoxm just uses the machine timestamps and works just like entries_index, just using the timestamps to order posts for presentation. entries_timestamp also allows modification of the human timestamps, however, so that if you want to tweak the publish date you just modify the timestamp string in the entries_timestamp.index metadata file, and then tell blosxom to update its machine-timestamps from the human- ones by passing a reindex=<$entries_timestamp::reindex_password> argument to blosxom i.e.

http://www.domain.com/blosxom.cgi?reindex=mypassword

It also supports migration from an entries_index index file, explicit symlink support (so you don't have to update timestamps to symlinked posts explicitly), and has been mostly rewritten to be (hopefully) easier to read and maintain.

It's available in the blosxom sourceforge CVS repository.

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