May 17, 2004
Weblogs
The movable type licensing fiasco has led to a lot of impending switchers. I've been wanting a better weblog for a while, myself.But here's the thing - I'm a weblogger and a programmer. I'm fluent in both php and perl. Fluent enough to pay my bills, anyway. Not fluent enough to kick the asses of the famous perl/php programmers that lead well-known open-source projects, but fluent enough to be the senior developer of an ad-hoc freelancer team.
Pretty much all of these better, newer content-management systems - wordpress, textpattern - are php. That's fine. Php is great - and better than perl - for implementing the more common 80% of needs out there. Faster, lighter, more quicksilver, and it gets out of the way. Blog software is a good match for that because the whole point of CMS is to make a redundant process very easy.
But for that last 20%? Perl rules. And if you're a good perl programmer, that first 80% is fine, too.
There's a great wiki suite for perl called Kwiki - tiny, ultra-flexible, and very extendible. It's a wiki for programmers, that practically invites you to get into the guts and change things and extend things. And since movable type is in perl as well, I was able to write a plugin that combined the two. Now just by typing kwdiv: HomePage, I can make any of my wiki nodes appear inline in my weblog:
Welcome to my wiki. Some pages (like this one) are protected, but most are public, meaning you can edit them if you see an edit button. Feel free to play around in the SandBox.
To participate, go to the UserPage and follow the instructions. Then your page edits will have your user name attached to them.
I have a Proofs page - go here to participate in generating Social Proofs.
Movable Type users might be interested in my RevisionPlugin.
And it also incorporates my revision history plugin, which I was also able to easily add to my weblog because it was written in perl.
Movable Type's license made the hacking a stretch, but it being in perl is what makes the plugin development so interesting. But now the licensing is more restrictive and I want to see what else is out there.
So I want a perl weblog package. Something that is to weblogs like kwiki is to a wiki. I have ideas - it's common for blogs to be integrated with discussion software. But I want them to also be integrated with a wiki (which you see sometimes), and with an issue-tracking system (which you never see, aside from cvstrac, which integrates cvs, bugtracking, and a wiki, which I'm completely in love with), and with voting, and with revision histories, and with other collaborative tools. I need something I can extend really easily.
So for me the weblog package doesn't so much depend on what features it already has, as it does on how the backend looks. Maybe one of the php suites has a kickass backend architecture, but right now I'm still biased towards perl.
I've looked at blosxom and I don't like how it's tied to the filesystem hierarchy. And right now, it looks like the only other perl option to consider is Scoop.
If anyone knows of a weblog system that will make me twitterpated, let me know.