pLog 0.2 has been released, marking the second important release of the project after the successful 0.1 branch. Of course, pLog 0.2 brings an impressive set of new features:

• Speed improvements. pLog should feel now much faster than 0.1.x. In our tests, the time required to process a request was about 5-6 times faster
• Improved administration interface. Now every single aspect of pLog can be controlled from the administration console. There is no need to edit configuration files anymore!
• User levels, including normal users, blog owners and users with administrator permissions. Possibility to easily add/remove users from blogs.
• Improved "Read More" feature. Now instead of abruptly cutting the post, you'll get two different text boxes when typing the post so that the user can choose what to show in the main page and what to show in the post page.
• User comments can be auto formatted. Also, it is now possible to choose in which order user comments will appear, newest first or oldest first.
• Easy interface to dynamicall add language files and theme packs.
• Search-engine friendly URLs (only available when using Apache 1.3.x)
• Improved plugin interface.
• Bug Fixes

A few template sets and additional plugins have also been released, but have not been included in the main package. They can be found in the "Extras" section in the top menu bar.

Keep reading for more information or see the release notes for pLog 0.2 (More)

Go and grab pLog 0.2-beta and help us testing! The beta is feature complete and there shouldn't be many bugs left (as far as we know :)) The only things missing are the updated versions of the non-English languages but that has been scheduled for the first release candidate. For a brief list of changes since 0.1.2, see the release notes. We will provide a more detailed one for the final version. And remember, you can still help us to translate pLog to your language!
Drop us a line in the forums if you find any bug. Happy plogging! :)

I uploaded yesterday to SourceForge the packages containing release 0.1.2. One of our readers from our forums noticed a bug in the code that takes care of sending trackback pings to hosts that support that feature. While fixing that bug, another important one related to receiving trackbacks was found and also fixed. It's only two bugs but I thought the problems were important enough to make another release. Get it from the usual place.
Happy p-logging! :)

The first maintenance release of the 0.1 series peacefully made its way to the download servers today and it is available for download in the downloads area. It is meant to be a maintenance release fixing a few bugs that were discovered after releasing 0.1, so it has no new features. The only interesting new things in this release are two additional translations of the texts, Japanese and German, thanks to the collaboration of two of our users (kudos to them on behalf of the team!) New translations are always welcome so please get in touch with us (forums or mail) if you're insterested in helping us out.
Have a look at the ChangeLog for more details about the changes in this version.
Happy blogging! At least while we finish version 0.2 :)

Final release of the 0.1 version. A few bugs were caught and fixed, but other than that, it is the same 0.1rc1 version that was released last week. Please see the Changelog for this version for more information. Documentation has also been updated and the packages are now smaller, since many unneeded files have been removed. Can be downloaded from here
These are the basic changes:

• Now by default no network checks are performed when entering email address. If you wish to have that functionality back, please enable the "check_email_address_validity" setting in the configuration file. This setting has been reported to cause some problems and timeouts.
• When entering a new link in the admin interface, if the user forgot to add the "http://" in front, it will be added.
• A few strings from the default template had not been localized.
• The texts for htmlarea were in Spanish rather than in English. Now they're back to English.
• If htmlarea wasn't enabled, the help window wasn't working in the admin interface. That has been fixed.

If you think you've found another bug, please do not hesitate to let us know, either via the forums, mailing list, or the bug reporting interface provided by Sourceforge.
Happy blogging, and thanks to all the users who reported bugs and who are already running pLog!

It took a while but the first release candidate is finally here! If nothing really strange happens, this release will eventually become the 0.1 final release.
All you need to do is grab the files from here, either in tar.gz or in tar.bz2 format, unpack them and run the wizard.php script. The new version comes with redesigned and slicker documentation that will guide you through the process of installing pLog, if any help is required at all. The documentation can also be browsed on-line here.
If you are installing from the latest development release, plog-devel-20030805, the wizard includes also support for upgrading the database structure (which has slightly changed a little) but it will take care of everything so that you don't lose your information. If you are installing from a previous development release, it is strongly recommended that you recreate the whole database since there have been too many changes since then.
Finally, if you are installing from a previous pLog stable release, it is also recommended that you throw it all away since changes are way too extreme to keep things compatible. However, in a few days I will post a simple php script that I myself developed and used to convert my own journal to the latest version.
For your information, this is a brief list with the most important changes since the last stable release:

• Completely rewritten code base, to make it more modular, following a pseudo-MVC model.
• Multiple unlimited users per blog and multiple blogs per single installation of pLog.
• Database storage
• Smarty based templating layer that completely isolates the presentation of the content from the core classes.
• Posts now can be classified under categories, and comments can be posted for every post.
• Visual edition of HTML code, thanks to the HTMLArea component (only available if using Mozilla 1.3b+ or IE 5.5 or higher)
• Automatic generation or archives and calendar.
• Completely localizable, including texts, dates, numbers and the administration interface. The default package contains texts in English, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Chinese (traditional) and Chinese (Taiwan), Italian (partly) and Portuguese (partly) Please contact the team leaving a message in the forums or by joining the mailing list if interested in translating pLog to your own language.
• Blogging features: Support for XML-RPC Ping notification-style for sites like Weblogs.com or blo.gs. Support for sending and receiving Trackback pings. Generation and aggreagation of RSS feeds.
• Easily extendable with a plugin system

Please, if you find any bug or problem, do not forget to report it either in the project forums or directly by filling in a bug report using the interface at Sourceforge. You collaboration is as important as the code itself!

Happy blogging! :)

As promised, this should be the last beta release. Main improvements are the extraction of all the static strings from the template files, since they have been moved to the locale file. Now that texts have stabilized (specially the ones from the administration interface) it would be nice if there is anybody who would be insterested in translating pLog to as many languages as possible. Feel free to help :) For a more detailed information, please refer to the release notes and Changelog. Other remarkable changes are the addition of the "user" parameter, more intuitive than the "blogId" parameter, and the complete redesign of the administration interface. Oh, and you must recreate the database once more before installing this release!

If there are no outstanding bugs, I would say this is ready for prime time, but let me know if you'd like to include any other translation in the main release.

Happy blogging! :)

Since I won't be working on pLog for the next two or three days, I have decided to release what I have now so that you can play with it and see how it feels. Please check the release notes and Changelog, but these are basically the changes since the plog-devel-20030725 version:

• Added the summary page
• Added a replacement for the glob() function, which is capable of detecting the php version we're using and either using the faster native version or the alternative version if php version is lower than 4.3
• Added a "Plugin Center" to see a list of plugins available.
• Possibility to enable or disable comments on a per blog basis.
• Improvements in the interface to send trackback pings.
• Changes in the structure of plugins.

As usual, please use the forums or the mailing list to report any problem with this release.
It is very important that you recreate the structure of the database, since there have been a couple of minor changes, otherwise unexpected things might happen. Please do not forget this.
Finally, the following things are badly missing before the final version:

• Redesign of the administration interface, keeping the same options availble but making it look more attractive.
• A script to convert blogs from the old version to the new one.

I hope to have everything ready very soon! I'll keep you updated :) UPDATE: I have fixed a very important bug in the code, which didn't properly return all the blogs to which a user can belong. I would not have worried too much about it but the bug is quite critical... I have re-uploaded the release but you can also find the file that has changed attached to this bug report. Sorry about that!

I could not resist releasing another beta :) And there you, straight from the oven: plog-devel-20030725. Please consult the Changelog for more information on what has changed regarding the last beta, but to sum up, I'd say that it is very very close to becoming the major stable release. Oh, and support to send trackback pings ;)
Many thanks to Bradley Bliang for his registration script, that allows user to easily create new blogs in a server.

I am proud to announce that the first beta of the development version of pLog has been released. It doesn't have a proper version number (by the way, what should it be when it comes out, 0.1? 1.0??) because it is not a final version but a really stable beta. There are few little features which I haven't had time to implement but they'll be there for the final version (automatically open the links in new windows, automatic translation of smileys into icons, etc) as soon as I have time to finish them.
Other than that, this version has been in use in the project page for the last couple weeks without a glitch. It has to be noted, though, that this version is completely incompatible with the older stable version, mainly because the structure of the database has changed a lot. I haven't had time yet to write a script to 'convert' information from the old database format into the new one but that will be there in the final version too.
The package comes with detailed installation instructions that can also be checked here and as a new feature, a four-step wizard that will guide you through the process of installation. The wizard could have hidden bugs but it has always worked fine in my tests. If everything fails, a couple of sql scripts are also provided so that you can at least try to set up everything manually.
Other things that are planned for the final version are a nicer default template (do you know XHTML+CSS and want to help? drop me a line!) and a nicer set of templates for the administration interface (you'll notice that now it feels kind of "raw" ;)) In the meantime, the old default style and two more styles borrowed from The Book of Styles are included in the package.
Happy blogging!
UPDATE: Due to a bug report, reporting that urls were not properly encoded, I have made another maintenance release of the stable branch, 20030724. It is not a critical update unless you really need to have usernames with non-alphanumeric characters (for instance, "you&me" will not work prior to this release) Please report any other bugs you find. Thanks!!