bedeviled mojo slop

It's about as good a time as any to give some lip service to some of the exciting new capabilities in blojsom 2.23. Expect the official release later on this week. All of this in less than 3 weeks since our last release!

PLUGINS

7 new plugins. We only had 3 new plugins in the last release. The more plugins the better I say!

Now you can protect your blog using basic authentication. Useful if you want to run a private blog for you or your team. Or maybe you'd like to provide members-only syndication feeds.

The category template plugin let's you assign different templates on a per-category basis. Illustrated here. You can use this to be creative or maybe you want to assign authors a particular category on a single blog but still allow them to have their space look different.

As an example of a "headless" plugin or one that doesn't affect the entries passed to it, there's the Cross Post plugin. This plugin responds to new blog entry events and if a category is setup to cross post entries, this plugin will do that for you. It works with Blogger and MetaWeblog API-compatible endpoints.

It's also a good use of our event notification and listener API that's been in blojsom since September of 2004. Check the bottom of that page out. You can even write listeners that are simply POJOs.

Another contribution from the man who brought you the SCode plugin, you've got the Gravatar plugin. Comments on your blog won't ever look the same again!

The No Follow plugin which adds rel="nofollow" support to blojsom is now part of the core. This was previously released on its own the day Google announced support for this link attribute.

And of course everyone wants to know what the weather is like in your area. Use the weather plugin.

Template editing is now more capable that it was previously. You can now add new templates and delete existing templates. You can also add and delete sub-directories in your templates directory. This is useful when you want to override existing templates. For example, there are Velocity templates used for the e-mail that gets sent when someone posts a comment or trackback. You can now create the proper sub-directories and override those templates.

PERMISSIONS

blojsom is a true multi-blog and multi-user capable blog software package. It's perfect for group or team blogs. You can setup as many blogs as you want to run off a single blojsom installation. You can also add as many users as you want in a single blog. However, one of the shortcomings in the multi-user support has been that each authorized user for a given blog is treated the same in terms of permissions. If I've got 3 authorized users setup on one of my blogs, then all 3 of those users can edit categories, entries, templates, etc. That's not always desirable.

So, with this release of blojsom, each authorized user can be assigned individual permissions. I can now specify that my user is allowed to do anything and I can assign permissions to the other 2 users that only allow them to edit blog entries and add new categories. Or maybe I don't want to provide access to the web administration capabilities to a given user at all. Instead I'd only like them to be able to post using a blog client that uses one of the Weblog APIs like the Blogger, MetaWeblog, or Atom API. Maybe I only want them to be able to post using the MetaWeblog API. Maybe I only want to give them the ability to add, edit and delete entries using the MetaWeblog API, but I don't want them to be able to post images or sounds files that use the MetaWeblog API's newMediaObject method. Now, I didn't go that crazy in assigning permissions at the method level, but hey, it can be done.

Or maybe you want to write a plugin to allow people to register on your blog. Then you can allow only registered users to submit comments. Or like with the new basic authentication plugin, members-only or private syndication feeds.

All of that and more is possible now in blojsom.

REMINDER

Oh, and don't forget about the developer's contest where I'm giving away $$$ and prizes. If you don't enter, you can't win!