bedeviled mojo slop

At the moment I'm updating blojsom's administration console with a new look and feel. It's sexy, but that's besides the point.

What's really sexy is the fact that all of my edits are being done from the blog's templates directory. I don't even have to touch the actual administration console pages in CVS until I'm ready to commit all of the new pages into CVS. blojsom's templating system allows me to override any or all of the packaged templates. So, page-by-page, I'm making my edits in my blog and testing to make sure everything looks and acts correctly. If there's a page I haven't started yet, blojsom just uses the one that's already packaged.

All of this can, of course, be done on a per-blog basis. So, let's say I had 6 blogs running on an installation of blojsom. Conceivably, there could be 6 entirely different look and feels for the administration console. Entirely different could mean each page has been tweaked or just a subset of the pages could be different.

This also applies to other packaged templates like the template used for comment and trackback e-mail messages. Don't like the default one that comes with blojsom? Override it and add, edit, remove any information you want from the template.

<tommy-boy>

Tommy: Did you hear I graduated?
Richard Hayden: Yeah and just a shade under a decade. All right.
Tommy: You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.
Richard Hayden: I know, they're called doctors.

</tommy-boy>

blojsom 2.24 (Codename: 42 Below) is available. Might take a little before the SourceForge mirrors get the "juice".

Changelog. Upgrading. Quickstart download. Update, source, add-ons download.

Now that we've got that out of the way, onto some specific highlights.

1. Adding blogs got a *whole* lot easier. I wanted to enable sites to tie into existing registration processes and to have the ability to use automated scripts to create new blogs. All you have to do now is to create the proper blog directories and configuration files and blojsom will pickup the new blog. Simple as that.

I'll detail the steps tomorrow.

2. You can now use MD5 encrypted passwords for blojsom. This is a per-blog setting. Add the following property to your blog.properties file.

use-encrypted-passwords=true

You may also use the encrypted password conversion utility to convert your existing authorization.properties file.
Be sure to backup this file before doing the conversion in case anything should go wrong. Usage of the utility is as follows.

java -cp blojsom-core-2.24.jar org.blojsom.util.password.EncryptedPasswordConversion full-path-to-authorization.properties-file

3. There are 3 plugins which now dynamically add content to the admin console when adding/editing a blog entry. They are the language selection plugin allowing you to select a language for the entry, the markup selection plugin allowing you to select the type of markup to apply to the entry, and the RSS enclosure plugin allowing you to select a file as an RSS enclosure for the entry (think podcasting).

I'm going to be exploring this capability a lot in further releases. It's a gas for sure.

And expect to see the plugins from the developer's contest in the next release.

Unfortunately tonight I got the edits for the new look and feel for the administration console. I was really hoping to have that integrated into this release, but cross-browser issues and schedules got in the way. Now that all of that is taken care of, I'll be updating the administration console templates to use the new look and feel. Comparing the current and soon-to-be-previous interface and the new interface is really night and day. It's looking that good! Don't despair. Once the administration templates have been modified accordingly, I'll make a template update available.

And so there it is. Adding new blogs to an installation is now far easier. If you want, authorization information is now more secure. And this is just the start of plugins being able to dynamically modify the administration console.