bedeviled mojo slop

Changelog. Download.

Executive summary: Fixes, better editing, comment and/or trackback auto-expiration *and* throttling, configurable ping URLs, new plugins (incl. moblog plugin).

blojsom. Simply the best.

- Fixed loading of a few properties files, most notably, blog.properties, which did not load properties in UTF-8. Honestly I don't know how I missed this one, but someone wrote and said, "I can't use Chinese characters in my blog name." and I said, "DOH!". Such a silly mistake given blojsom does excel in internationalization.

- Updated Velocity and FreeMarker dispatchers to allow for sharing of Velocity and FreeMarker templates, respectively, across users. For whatever reason, the code was in the JSP dispatcher and Groovy dispatcher to allow for sharing of templates, but not for the Velocity and FreeMarker dispatchers. Basically, this means you can have a /WEB-INF/templates directory and place templates like the the syndication format (Atom and various RSS formats) templates here instead of replicating them across users.

- Added meta-data support to the BlogComment and Trackback classes. Added support for loading of comment and trackback meta-data in the standard fetcher. At the moment, the meta-data captured in the Comment and Trackback plugins is the IP address of the person leaving a comment or trackback. Further down the road this will probably be useful for things like comment/trackback moderation or comment/trackback approval.

- Added Markdown plugin to allow you to use Markdown syntax in your blog entries. Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Really, it's a callout to the Markdown perl script from the plugin, but whatever, it works. Neither Mark nor myself could bear to unleash a Markdown4J upon the world

- Updated Edit Blog Properties plugin to allow for editing of comment, trackback, and weblogs ping plugin proprerties.

- Updated Edit Blog Entries plugin so that when you add a new blog entry or edit an existing blog entry, you will be taken to the editing page for that menu instead of having to navigate the menus to edit the particular entry.

- Updated Show Me More plugin to allow arbitrary sections of blog entries to be cut from "public" view.

Demo of this capability.

- Updated Simple Search plugin so that the search is case insensitive. Not much more to say on this.

- Updated Macro Expansion plugin to check for null or blank in the title or description.

- Updated Google Highlight plugin to check for potential NullPointerException when no search query is matched from the regular expression.

- Updated Edit Blog Entries plugin so that entries without titles would not use the entire description as the title.

- Updated Comment and Trackback plugins to allow for auto-expiration of comments and trackbacks for entries after a certain number of days. These are configured through the following properties in blog.properties for the comment and trackback plugins, respectively.

    plugin-comment-days-expiration={some number of days}
    plugin-trackback-days-expiration={some number of days}

This is a feature I've seen in MovableType. It's now a feature in blojsom.

- And did I mention the Comment and Trackback plugins also support throttling? These are configured through the following properties in blog.properties for the comment and trackback plugins, respectively.

    plugin-comment-throttle={some number of minutes}
    plugin-trackback-throttle={some number of minutes}

- Adding the blog property blog-ping-urls to your individual blog.properties file allows you to set the list of URLs that should pre-populate the ping URLs box when adding or editing blog entries. For example:

    blog-ping-urls=http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://ping.blo.gs http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

If you do not use the web administration interface, you can still use this property to control the URLs that are sent a ping when the WeblogsPingPlugin executes. Dual-use property! Joy

- Added Forgotten Password plugin so authorized users can have their password sent by e-mail if for some reason they forget their password. E-mail addresses can be added to the authorization.properties file by separating the e-mail address with a "," after the password. Example:

    username=password,email@address.com

Any usernames without e-mail addresses are assume to be the property of the blog owner, so in these cases, a forgotten password e-mail message would be sent to the blog owner's e-mail address.

- Added Groovy plugin which allows you to write blojsom plugins using Groovy. The scripts must implement the BlojsomPlugin interface. The plugin can also accept a request parameter, groovy-scripts which is a comma-separated list of the scripts to execute. This parameter is used if the Groovy plugin is included more than once in one of the flavor-based plugin chains. The first time the plugin executes, it would use the first script in the groovy-scripts parameter list, and the second time the plugin executes, it would use the second script in the groovy-scripts parameter list, and so on.

- Updated RDF JSP and Velocity templates to add missing items element inside the channel element. Also updated JSP templates to use an appropriate content type and character set declaration.

- Updated Flex theme templates where the default/ directory was removed which caused incorrect loading of some pages.

- Updated Velocity to the 1.4 release.

- Moblog plugin. Yes folks. Finally! blojsom now has a moblog plugin. In the next release we're going XML-RPC with it so stay tuned. But this version still rocks. Hollah!

Current capabilities:

• Configurable list of authorized posters (e-mail FROM: addresses)
• Configurable poll time
• Configurable image mime types (added as <img .../> reference in the moblog entry)
• Configurable attachment mime types (added as <a href .../> reference in the moblog entry)
• Configurable text mime types (for being able to just send an e-mail to your blog)

Announcing: The blojsom wiki powered by Confluence. The blojsom JIRAinstance. Over the next day, all of the content from the SourceForge site will be migrated to the wiki. Why? It's not that the Forrest generated site is a pain in the ass to maintain, but ... it's a pain in the ass to maintain. I want to add new pages easily and be able to easily tweak pages that need changing in real time. The wiki is great for that type of editing and documentation. And it'll be a helluva lot easier to add screenshots and allow users to edit the documentation as well. As far as JIRA, well, the folks at Atlassian gave us a license. And I'll be damned if we're not going to use it. Besides, JIRA is much nicer than the SourceForge tracker.

Let's recap folks since there's a lot to digest here.

• blojsom 2.14 rocks.
• Lots of worthwhile updates.
• Comment/Trackback auto-expiration and throttling.
• Configurable ping URLs.
• Moblog plugin.
• Groovy plugin.
• Markdown plugin.
• Forrest is dead to me.
• The SourceForge tracker is dead to me

This should keep some folks busy for awhile. Enjoy!