Let's say, for the sake of the discussion, that someone was thinking of writing a new blogging system. This is of course purely hypothetical, and does not suggest in any way that this person is already knee-deep in code.

What features would you like to see in such a thing? The hypothetical feature list that this hypothetical person has handed me includes the following:

Essentials
Easy and complete import from and export to Movable Type
Templates similar to, but both more flexible and simpler than, MT*
Comments - with filtering
Trackbacks - with filtering
Extended entries
Configurable archives - daily, weekly, monthly; category; author; combination e.g. category by month
Built in support for blogrolls
Macro expansions - expand shorthand codes into something more complicated, e.g. : ) into <img src=/smilies/icon_smile.gif>
Easy manual and automatic backups
Easy file uploads
Multiple templates - try out new formats without effecting your main page
Multiple authors per blog
Multiple blogs per author
Email notification
Speed - must be effectively instantaneous for all common tasks
Open source - must be free for all people to use, share and customise
And a nice simple customisable web interface

Nice to Have
Polls
Chat thingy (like tagboard)
Private messages (reader to blogger)
Blog groups - blogs in a group can share files, blogrolls, posts and so on
Users - regular readers can set up an account, get notifications and, um, stuff
Forum - extended features for comments to extend it towards web-forum functionality. All such features would be configurable.
Dictionaries - similar to macros, but you could set up multiple dictionaries for different purposes. A simple database inside your blog.
Plugins and filters - allow other people to extend the blogging system
XML/RDF feeds - I've never used this, but some people swear by it.
File manager - mange the files you've uploaded
Photo manager - keep your photos in check, with automatic resizing and thumbnailing
Mirroring - automatically copies your blog to another server every time it is updated

* The main thing the hypothetical person plans to do here is to have nested templates. So, your main page would have something like:

<MIEntries days=7> -- This selects all entries for the last 7 days, and processes each one in turn using the following lines
      <MIIfFirstOfDay> blah blah </MIIfFirstOfDay> -- This does special formatting for the first post of each day, such as date headers and borders
      <MIEntry template=Standard> -- Insert the entry here, using the Standard entry template
      <MIIfLastOfDay> blah blah </MILastOfDay> -- Closes borders and stuff like that
</MIEntries>

You can plug in a sub-template just about anywhere, and it will be pulled in automatically when a page is generated.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:43 AM | Comments (157) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Spell check!
I mean, I would want spell check, not that you need to spell check this post.
I need more coffee....

Posted by: Susie @ at December 12, 2003 03:50 PM

2 A spell checker... Hmm. A simple one wouldn't be hard.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 12, 2003 04:23 PM

3 Um, I mean, I'll pass that on to Mr Hypothetical.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 12, 2003 04:24 PM

4 Yeah, definiatly Spell Check. And the ability to write a post, and have it posted at an advanced time, with out showing up automatically... That would be nice. And for people who are HTML/challanged maybe a simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get program. But if not, okay.

Posted by: Mookie @ at December 13, 2003 01:43 AM

5 Spel checkr. Got it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 13, 2003 07:49 AM

6 Fully agree on some kind of time delay posting, so you can set a post to be released some time in the future. Spull chuckur could be handy. And automatic smileys in the comments.

Posted by: Simon @ at December 13, 2003 11:34 AM

7 I don't know how possible this is, but maybe some tools to work with comments. The ability to list comments by name or email address, a group delete function in case spam gets through, a search function for comments to go find that particular one where someone said...

Posted by: Ted @ at December 13, 2003 12:40 PM

8 Good suggestions. Mr Hypothetical says thanks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 13, 2003 06:54 PM

9 Formatting buttons for all comment sections and the ability to use strike in the comments would be a nice and useful feature. By the way, could you enable the strike in our comments? Thanks!

Posted by: The Bartender @ at December 14, 2003 10:42 PM

10 Another thing is something that autosaves posts in draft status as you are doing them, maybe every 5 or 10 minutes. That way I someone doesn't lose them after they've almost finished a long post.

Posted by: Simon @ at December 15, 2003 07:42 AM

11 how about an include feature that operates above the blog parser level so you could use stuff in SSI's? Of course that would mean that the pages would have to be built on the fly which would result in a pretty hefty server proc cycle overhead and ... oh I've gone cross eyed...

Posted by: rob @ at December 15, 2003 04:48 PM

12 an it would be nice if it was written in something less archaic than perl ... I'm done now.

Posted by: rob @ at December 15, 2003 04:50 PM

13 I would like a button where we can trackback to the server of all spam commenters, and when we recieve a spam comment, we Hit The Button and the program tracksback to the servers of the spammers and they are given The Top Secret Intel Signal of Self-Destruction, resulting in lots of explosions and fire and general destruction of the spam servers, and a pox upon thee and thine of the spam server person with boils on their bottoms, too.

But if that's a little unfeasible, pretty colors are nice.

Posted by: Victor @ at December 15, 2003 07:40 PM

14 Victor is on to something huge here!

We NEED an 'Electrocute Crap-Weasle' button!!!

Posted by: Ted @ at December 15, 2003 07:55 PM

15 Hurray for the boiling of bottoms!
Pox is good too.

Posted by: LeeAnn @ at December 15, 2003 09:55 PM

16 rob - Mr Hypothetical is planning to use SSIs to improve page generation speed. This is how the nested template system will work. SSIs seem to work pretty darn fast in Apache, so it doesn't look like they will be a problem.

Also, Mr H. is a big fan of Python. I hope that meets with your approval.

simon - Making autosave work well in a web application is tricky, but Mr H promises to explore this.

Susie, Mookie - Mr H. informs me that a prototype spell-checker is already operational, and can spell-check a 2000-word post in 0.54 seconds (on a 1GHz P3). Of that, 0.50 seconds is taken up in loading the dictionary... In production, the dictionary would already be loaded, so it would only take 0.04 seconds. We can probably live with that.

In the test post it found such bloopers as desrve, contraints, serach, tunring and skwering. However, it also found don't, we're and people's, so it needs a bit of tweaking.

Victor, Ted & LeeAnn - I will speak to Mr H regarding the Electrocute Crap-Weasel button and see what can be done.

Victor - There will likely be a pretty-colour version, and also a dull-grey version for those who post from work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 16, 2003 03:51 AM

17 Oh, and Mr Bartender, you can enable strike in comments yourself - it's in the MT config thingy. You can enter a list of acceptable HTML tags. My list is: a href,i,b,u,strike,sup,sub,br,p

It's on a per-blog basis, so you need to decide yourselves which ones you want to allow.

Mr H will look into formatting buttons. Any features implemented will work in both IE and Mozilla... And hopefully other browsers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 16, 2003 03:55 AM

18 So Pixy I just copied your list (a href,i,b,u,strike,sup,sub,br,p) and pasted it to my preferences. Will they work now?

Posted by: Susie @ at December 16, 2003 05:30 AM

19 It won't let me use strike in the PP comments, though it will here...

Posted by: Susie @ at December 16, 2003 06:03 AM

20 ok, I see now--you allowed "strike" whereas I was typing "s" and not getting a result. So I added "s" to the list and am rebuilding...hope it works now, cuz I'm lazy a minimalist

Posted by: Susie @ at December 16, 2003 06:09 AM

21 Oh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 16, 2003 06:10 AM

22 Python sounds and looks funky although I've never actually used it. Another couple of suggestions for Mr H.

* Full X browser compatibility (down to version 5)

* Xhtml compliant markup (things like parsing the & into automatically)

* A PDA compatible version of the admin pages! I'm currently writing one for MT.

*Some tags which make use of the data produced by the various "Now playing" plugins for WMP WinAmp etc.

* And I'm not sure if this is covered in notification but it would be nice to be able to sign up for an email when someone replies to a comment you left.

And am I being dense but you can already have formatted buttons - just stick a class on them or even swap them out for ___ buttons.

Posted by: rob @ at December 16, 2003 12:51 PM

23 The Bartender was referring to little buttons that do italics and bold and underline so that you don't have to type in the <i> <b> <u>.

Cross-browser compatibility is a key point, and Mozilla and IE are just the minumum (Mr H tells me).

Your other points are certainly worth thinking about, but might not make the first (or rather, zeroth) release, which Mr H is hoping will be ready sometime next month.

And Python is indeed funky, assuming you mean that in a good way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at December 16, 2003 01:53 PM

24 Funky is a good thing unless used in reference to smell!

Hmm, those buttons should be stylable but for some reason are rendered by javascript. All they do is call a function in the comments JavaScript so there is no reason why they can't be replaced with your own buttons (famous last words!) ... I'll investigate and see how easy it'll be to do with the current MT interface.

Posted by: Rob @ at December 16, 2003 10:07 PM

25 How about a little automatic skinning???

Posted by: Daniel @ at December 17, 2003 05:46 PM

26 Rob: I have the formatting buttons installed on my site if you want to go check them out. They look and work fine and even allow shortcut key formatting [ctrl][shift] etc. They work but don't display in my individual archives... only displays x picture... haven't really looked into it though. These buttons do not show up in Mozilla for some reason... probably the Mozilla Monster ate them??

FWIW: I took the code for the buttons out of the page where you post your entries, if that helps you any.

Posted by: The Bartender @ at December 20, 2003 06:23 AM

27 Thanks Pixy. Got my strike etc updated and working like a champ!

Posted by: The Bartender @ at December 20, 2003 06:33 AM

28 I also added blockquotes to your list.

Posted by: The Bartender @ at December 20, 2003 06:35 AM

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