Roadmap
19. Aug. 2003
Now that the stable version is a frozen state, meaning that no more new features will be added before its release, it is time to start thinking on what will come next. The pLog team has several new features in mind and we would like to know what you -the users- think about them and if they would really be useful to anybody. Please note that the list of features I am going to give now is not sorted in any order (the first one will not be implemented first and the last one won't be implemented the last), but they will be written as they come to my head :)
- Possibility to easily upload pictures and files, so that we can include them in posts and generate albums. There is already some work on this and this is probably the first feature that will be included in the new release, since I belive it is quite important to be able to add pictures to one's diary. But we will also have the possibility to create our own photo albums and show them to our friends.
- A cleaner interface to add new themes/template sets and to invite users to join our blog. At the moment there is no other way to do that, other than adding records to the database manually.
- Search feature.
- Support for PostgreSQL as the underlying database storage system.
- Enable or disable comments on a per-post basis, rather than on a global basis like now.
- Blog-over-email features, so that we don't need a browser to quickly publish our stories.
- "Hidden" categories. This basically means that not all categories would be shown in the homepage but only the ones we would select. This would be helpful in case we still want to have those categories but we don't want to clutter the web site with too much text. These categories would still be shown on the list of categories and could be still accessed by readers.
- Generation or RSS-compliant feeds on a per-category basis, not on a general basis.
- Many more templates included in the default package (or in an additional template package), so that people with zero knowledge of html and templates can find something that they like.
- XMLRPC Blogger-compatible API
- More than one category per post.
Is there support for defining what the first page shown is? As of the 0729 release (still waiting for a final :) ) the default opening page was the first blog, but I'd like to display the summary page. As a multiple-user solution, I think that makes sense.
Mentioned above, regarding the template editting. Is this possible to be done on a private level (per-user basis)? As I'm planning on multiple users, I would really hate for one user to edit the template and ruin another user's blog layout.
Keep up the good work Oscar, I'm writing up some plugins that I think may work -- and also I have an offer for you.
I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to suggest :)
Regarding how to define the first page... I am not too sure wether this functionality belongs to pLog because it can be easily achieved with Apache. If you compiled Apache with mod_dir (which comes in the default distro), you can use the DirectoryIndex directive. It can also be specified in the .htaccess file if you don't have access to the main Apache config file.
If none of these alternatives is possible... then we'll have to consider moving that feature inside the core functionality of pLog.
does it need to be apache in the next version then? I'm running plog-0.2 on a caudium web server (all unmodified) and it's just fine. Since there are quite a lot of sites on that box, we can't change it to be an apache just for a single blog.
If I had a choice of what I really want is enabling of comments on per post basis and an interface for image/file uploads.
Well, it has to be apache in case you want to use advanced features such as search engine friendly urls, because it uses some advanced features only available in Apache. If you don't need those, it will be just fine, we simply recommend Apache because it's what the developers use and because we know it works :)
Regarding the next version, you'll get an easy interface for uploading images in 0.3 for sure. We're already working for it. In the meantime, one of users is developing a plugin to allow users to easily upload images that will do the while we finish the next version. Hopefully it'll be released in a few days.
Thanks for using pLog! :)
Oscar.