pLog 0.3 has just been released to the world, get it now while it's still hot! Keep reading if you want to know more about what's new in 0.3 and what's been fixed from the first beta to the final version.

Please use the forums to report any bug, and have a look at the documentation wiki. It is not 100% ready yet but we are working on it (help is always appreciated there!)

What's new in 0.3

Reorganization of the source tree

The first thing that was done when development for 0.3 started was to reorganize the source tree. We have to admit that it was very disturbing to have an application folder holding over 100 source files so we reorganized everything. Now all the php code is under the class/ folder, translations go under locale/, javascript goes under js/, template sets go under templates/ and so on.

Resources

It is now possible to upload any kind of file to our blog and let pLog take care of it. Some special file types are "known" to pLog and pLog will try to extract and display as much information as possible from them. Amongst others, JPEG, PNG, GIF, MOV/QT, AVI, WMV, MP3, AAC, OGG, ZIP are recognized by pLog and information such as height, width, bit depth (for images), length, encoding (sound and video files), compressed size, numbe or files (zipped files) will be shown to users.

If resource uploaded is recognized as an image, pLog will take care of generating a thumbnail using either the built-in GD functions or alternatively, ImageMagick. The format in which thumbnails are generated and its size is 100% customizable.

The resources framework has been integrated with HTMLArea to provide visual ways to easily add for example images from our collection to any post. Not only images, but links to any of the other resources from our collection! (HTMLArea is only available when using IE 5.5 or higher or Mozilla 1.3b+ or higher)

Security features:

pLog offers three security mechanisms in this new version to protect our blog from people with nasty intentions: IP-address blocking, simple regular expression-based content filter and last but not least, a fully-featured Bayesian filter to get rid of the annoying spam!

New default template

The amount of standard available templates has been reduced to only three in this version: the old and flashy 'lemons', the also old but more elegant 'grey' and the new standard one 'blueish', which is a port of an elegant MovableType template. Hope you like it! This new default template has been checked to be XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant and complies with most of the version 1.0 of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Time differences/offsets

If your blog is in a different time zone than the server where it is running, now pLog easily allows to specify time offsets that will be applied to every date in the system, up to +12/-12 hours

Enable/disable comments on a per-post basis

Comments can be enabled or disabled on a per-post basis, as well as on a per-blog basis or even on a global basis. The general rule is that global settings take precedence over everything else, per-post settings coming second and per blog settings take the less precedence. This basically means that we can disable comments for every post and enable for those ones when we are interested in having comments.

More RSS formats

pLog is capable, out-of-the box, of generating the following RSS/RDF syndication formats: 0.90, 1.0, 2.0 and a custom-defined XML format that can be turned into whatever we wish thanks to pLog's powerful template system. Even every category can have its independent RSS/RDF feed now, also in each one of the different formats at the same time!

XMLRPC ready!

Access via XMLRPC to our blog is now part of the default package of pLog. There is no need to download an additional plugin just to enjoy all the advantages provided by XMLRPC and the idea of publishing right from your desktop.

Latest version of all PHP libraries used

pLog has achieved a lot of its functionality by leveraging several well-known open source PHP projects. All those packages have been updated to their latest version to ensure that pLog users can enjoy the latest features and ensure that all older bugs have been fixed:

• Smarty 2.6.1
• ADOdb 4.20
• getid3 1.7.0
• PEAR::Date 1.4

No need for 'magic_quotes_gpc' anymore

pLog used to require the magic_quotes_gpc config setting set to 'true' in your PHP installation. This requirement has been removed and now pLog should work fine no matter what your configuration is. We cannot demand that users set it to true or false because this could make pLog incompatible with other PHP applications that do need that to be set to true, so from pLog's point of view, it doesn't matter anymore.

Changes from 0.3-beta to 0.3 final

The following is a list of the changes from beta 1 to the final 0.3:

• If you are using time offsets (positive or negative, doesn't matter), and update_post_counts is enabled, clicking the permalink of a post will make that the timestamp of the post in increased/decreased by as many hours as our time offset is (quite tricky to explain but believe me, it happens)
• When using htmlarea, some of its dialog windows were not correctly sized and were using scrollbars even when it wasn't necessary.
• Several misspellings of the words "whether" and "referrer" corrected, amongst others (thanks Daniel)
• admin.php and index.php kept thrashing each other's session data instead of sharing the same.
• The wizard now accepts empty database passwords (thanks Mike)
• Both admin.php and index.php will check if wizard.php is readable and if so, throw an error warning the user that it should be removed after installation and quit (thanks mike)
• Removed all debug code.
• Fixed several bugs in various core classes.
• Added two new translations: Japanese and Dutch (thanks Takumi and Koen)
• Fixed a bug in the resources section when running under windows, as the getid3 would not work in the 'helperapps' folder didn't exist (thanks forums user 'mike')
• Fixed a bug in the resources section when running under windows, so that files wouldn't be correctly opened and read due to incorrect permissions (thanks forums user mike)
• When removing a template, check if the folder exists or not, instead of throwing an error if the folder was already removed (thanks forums user 'dranor')
• Fixed a bug in the XMLRPC code when the XMLRPC-client was querying about the users's blogs.