After much poking, cajoling, and downright finger pointing and laughing by Bryn and a bunch of other "friends", I now have Gibe, the little project saving my sanity from the tedium of burn-out and under-stimulation, in a publically accessible place for more people to do more finger pointing and laughing.
Gibe is just your standard web log software - people can log in and add posts, other people can read the posts and make comments on them, and there's anti-spam (using akismet) and there's also a bit of a beginnings of a plugin architecture there for people who want to expand it beyond what it does now.
It's not ready for anyone to use without a time investment. The "default theme" is very specific to me, and well, it looks quite ugly compared to almost anything freely available out there even if you edit out the hardcoded mentions in the code. I'm using a bunch of other plugins that I haven't uploaded yet - a theme (the BloggingPro-based one I'm using at the time of writing), support for tags, support for hCalendar event microformat stuff, and so forth, and these are the next things I'll be putting together (well, that and a default theme that doesn't want people to puke...).
What you can see now is how it is put together. In a nut-shell, it's a TurboGears application, and it uses Routes for dispatching, SQLAlchemy and ActiveMapper for ORM and database access, and Genshi for templating. There's a very simple entry-points based plugin system that's enough to write themes and customise a few select number of things about the display of the site and of posts, and of generating and handling the form to create and edit posts and to make comments on posts.
In future, I'd like to move to using Elixir instead of ActiveMapper, and move over to using ToscaWidgets instead of TurboGears widgets.
If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them. If you're interested in backstory, look at other posts tagged gibe here (some might not be tagged with that, but with turbogears).
Finally! Expect the issues tracker to start filling up! Expect annoying phone calls at 3am on the weekend with my drunk voice on the other end inquiring about ticket #whatever!
Oh, problem #1, which I encountered on this post - it's difficult to see from the index page whether an entry has an extended view, ie. a 'read more' link, if the full content isn't displayed on the index.
When can I expect a fix (;
Gads, I guess this means I have no more excuse for moaning at you when it fails to render properly in Safari?
Bryn, I don't see a ticket number... No ticket, no bug... ;)
Can't wait to see it in full flight, as soon as i have a non-mass-hosted site and somewhere to run turbogears i'll give it a whirl ;)
If you've not had a look yet, habari may give you some ideas for your interfaces and such ( and yes, i know it's that EVIL php stuff ) :)
Heya Neil! I must investigate this, my stomach goes queasy thinking that wordpress is written in PHP. Cheers!
Hey Andy, great to hear from you! Hopefully your stomach won't go queasy looking at my code...
Let me know if you need any help.
Google search for gibe software: "Gibe is a mass-mailing worm written in Visual Basic. It disguises itself as a Microsoft security update."
It's become so hard to name anything :)
Finding a pronounceable name which isn't the name of some existing piece of software, or a worm, SEO web site, or other worthless malware, and which has an available domain name, and which isn't a swear-word in a top-10 language on the 'Net...
Now that would be a worthwhile web service - an automatic project-namer that ensured your above list is met :)
It seems like a pretty good solution that would fit into our existing website. Being new to gibe (and turbogears), I would appreciate if some one can point me to some instructions for deploying and using this as a plugin to our existing site. Cheers.