As it were…

I’ve been using Phlog, (blog software of my own making) for over a year now, and I’m getting the urge to make changes. I want to use it for my workplace, and Nathan wants to use it. So here’s the list of things I want:

Look And Feel

• Header and footer must be includable files. I want to use this for the radio stations, and be able to include their standard headers and footers. The option needs to be provided to include the $DOCUMENT_ROOT var or not, since some people may install this in their public_html dirs, rather than in the server doc root.

• I’d like for CSS to be either easy to manage, or off. Easy to manage means possibly database driven, so it can be managed from an admin area. Off so that I can set up a look and feel consistent with the rest of whatever site I’m installing it for.

  For now, I’m content with simply easy to manage, since there are few enough people here that I can slap them if they mess with it.

• Since the headers and footers are included, and probably already have a CSS file brought in, we’ll probably need to bring in another sheet just for Phlog. Joel does this with the @import url CSS option.

• I think there should be a seperate page for look and feel management, someplace where the header and footer URL’s can be input, the CSS can be edited, etc.

• Cookie/session-based login.

• Upon login, a number of links should appear: Edit post at the bottom of every post, sidebar related links (more on that later), a link to post a new item, and a link to user management.

• I’d like the login place to remain very unobtrisuve, to the point of making it simply a very small link that opens a pop-up, or even not having any kind of link, but requiring that the user go to an unlinked page to login. Upon login, it would take them to their page.

• We’ll need a page for user management. At this point I’d be happy with passwd change, and blog title. We need to decide how much user info we want to have. Bio? age?

• Since the header and footer are included, the sidebar should be an include seperate from them.

• The sidebar should be positioned using CSS, established in the CSS management are.

• There should be a table listing the titles of side boxes, with a URL for the content to be included therein. That way people can simply make a sidebox by putting a listing in the table, and including whatever content they make/find/steal.

• At the top of each sidebox there should be a link to move it up or down the list. I’m thinking tiny, tasteful arrows. There can also be an X to hide (not delete) the box.

• At the bottom of the list there should be a link to manage boxes; create, delete, unhide, and edit the default boxes.

• There should be a small set of default boxes included: search, recent posts, RSS feed, and links. For the search and RSS boxes, they should only be able to edit the titles. For the Recent Posts, they should be able to specify how many links they have showing.

• For RSS feeds, I’d like one for headlines, one for full text, and one for comments.