Tag Archives: b2

As I mentioned before I’m working on integrating b2++ and WordPress. To that end I’ve started on Smarty Template support and just this evening I checked in a few changes to WordPress CVS.
From my limited experience of sf.net CVS, it could be a few days before anon CVS will get those changes but watch out for them if you’re interested in that sort of thing!

What’s happening? You’ve no doubt noticed updates from time to time on blogs.linux.ie but no new release has been made in a long time, despite the fact that comment moderation and referer tracking is now in.
Spurred by Geoff (finally, sorry!), and others who have mailed I’d like to fill in some of the blanks:

1. b2++ will most likely be consumed by WordPress. AFAIK, I’m the only user of b2++ on the WP dev team, so making the transition from b2++ to WP painless might be more trouble than debugging b2++ install problems for Windows users!
2. After I released a mod for WP that added Smarty Template support there was a trickle of interest but I got bogged down by trying to do too much at the one time (making WP multi-blog aware) and I burned myself out. That and the fact that my personal life has been in major upheavel for the past 2 months. A few people know why I posted “Nothing Today” a month ago…
3. I volunteered to help with WP, but frankly, the prospect of redoing the same work I did for b2++ is daunting and just a little bit uninteresting for me. Note the word, uninteresting – that’s a powerful motivator in a volunteer project. I know things things can be done better in WP as I’ll be able to knock ideas off the heads of the other WP developers.

Will there be another b2++ release? Not likely, fork it if you like, but chances are good that WP will have many of the features of b2++ in the next few months.
If you need a community blog site, then go for b2++. In the future I want to make WP as compatible with b2++ as possible, thus providing for an upgrade path.

I went through the list of blogs here and deleted inactive ones. I was shocked at the amount of spammed comments on some of those blogs!

Blog owners here have been emailed too, so if you get an email from me requesting you click on a link on this site to validate your email, it’s in your interest to do so!
For some reason, Yahoo mail prints “\n” directly so urls are a bit fscked. Just click on them anyway as the info’ll get recorded in any case.

I made 2 minor changes to the blogroll plugin.

1. Big blogrolls (such as mine) will be read in correctly now, as I add a check for feof() instead of reading in one big block.
2. I added stripslashes() to it to get rid of the annoying slashes.

Moderation of comments is now enabled on every blog on this server!
When someone posts a comment, you’ll receive the usual email with the comment, but at the end of the email will be a link to the Comment Moderation page for your blog.
From this page you can list:

1. All comments posted in the past month.
2. All Comments.
3. New Comments.
4. Deleted Comments.
5. OK Comments.

Comments aren’t really deleted, just not displayed. I may add an option to “really delete” a comment eventually.
I’ve updated the comments on every blog here to “OK” status. This means all current comments will be displayed. You can change that status as you like from the backend.
Please leave a comment here, or mail me if you notice any bugs (There’s bound to be!), or have any feature requests.

Comment posting may break tonight if you post comments on any of the blogs on this site. Please be patient and visit again later!

Thanks to Dougal Campbell for writing a Pirate filter on his site. I copied the code and put it into a Smarty plugin. It’s available here for everyone on blogs.linux.ie to use as follows:

1. Open the Template Editor of your blog and bring up the “Posting” template.
2. Look for the {$the_content} variable in there.
3. You have to pass that variable to the pirate function: {pirate content=$the_content}. If you’re using the highlightsearch modifier, then use this code instead: {pirate content=$the_content|highlightsearch}.
4. Save the template and reload your blog. If it doesn’t update, then click on the “Refresh Site” link in the backend.

Oh, of course, it’ll only work today, as it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
UF has a special Pirate Talk Day feature today! 🙂

First of all the trivial stuff. I just noticed that my referer log was spammed by some domain resellers. The script I based my referer code on already had “checking” in there to make sure the referer actually listed your url on it, but I didn’t enable it. That’ll be enabled and added to b2options shortly. I also added a “delete” function to b2referers so you can delete referer records to get rid of spammers.
I just noticed that Google, Ask Jeeves and other search engines have visited in the past few days. I should really ignore those hits in the referer script.
This morning I received an email from Matthew Mullenweg asking me to join the WordPress effort. It took me all of 5 seconds to agree that b2 would be best served by a merger of b2++ and WordPress.
I’m off to Chicago on Sunday, life’s hectic here as I tie up loose ends. It’ll probably take a few weeks before there’s anything useable from this merger, but I’m excited at the future possibilities of b2!