2006 Nov 05 - Sun

Blosxom WriteBacks

So far, Blosxom has behaved quite nicely. It is amazing how such a compact application can effectively do so much. One addition I've wanted to add in order to make this site a two way street is WriteBacks. There were a few items in the Blosxom Plugin Registry, but have been a bit uncertain as to the reliability of the code, as it really hasn't been updated in quite some time. I finally did come across a link to Kevin Scaldeferri's Blog, from the Blosxom User Group Blog. He has a plugin, with recent updates which provides WriteGack capability.

During the installation process, there are a number of things needing doing. One is that you need the flavours from Rael's Original WriteBack Plugin. Don't install the plugin, just the flavour files. Then install Kevin's plugin. There are some configurations in the file you'll need to perform.

The trick with this is that you don't want all the comment submissions to happen on your main blog page, which will happen if you put the various bits in your default story.flavour. Instead, create two flavours, I call the default flavour 'blog', and the secondary flavour 'article'. In 'story.blog', along with the standard permanent link, you place the writeback count.

In story.article, you put the form to be posted. This draws the submission form only when viewing a single article. Use the supplied foot.writeback for inspiration. Also, in story.article, you place the code to view the writebacks. Use story.writeback for inspiration.

Be sure to make the various variable updates in the writeback plugin, and you should be good to go, but for some formatting and alignment issues you may want to tune.