The last few months, I’ve been working on a new project: a personal publishing platform. Originating from a blogging platform, the application I’m currently developing is much more: all different kinds of entries can be managed through it. Whether you want to post articles, blog posts, recipes or images, the system manages them all in the same way, but displays them differently.
I wanted my blog to be more than a place to write articles. I wanted to publish photos on it too, and files. I wanted to be able to host podcasts, and so on… But I also wanted to write personal notes (or asides), which would get displayed differently. And events, reviews, bookmarks…, which would get displayed differently according to their microformat definition (hCalendar, hReview, xFolk). And I’m not alone.
This Ruby on Rails-based application I’m developing allows me to do exactly that. It acts very much like a regular blogging tool, both its inside and outside look very much the same. However, there’s one difference: when writing an entry, you have to select which type of post you want to write, and a part of the post page changes. If you select to publish an image, you get a description and upload field, if you want to publish an article, you can write an excerpt and a body. But, if you for example write a review, you can enter the reviewed item, its type, a rating, and the body of the post. On the post page, then, that review is formatted using the hReview microformat, with stars to show the rating, a link to the product website…
Currently, I’m finishing the Alpha stage. The current version of this application supports the type-idea, you can read, write, edit and remove entries, and comments are supported. Tags are also already integrated, as is search. Feeds are available in RSS 2.0 and Atom format, trackbacks and pingbacks are supported and spam gets filtered using Akismet. In about a month, I will release the 0.5 Beta version, which will include support for users, and settings.
Of course, the application also still has to stabilize, as currently I’ve only used it on one computer with one installation of Ruby and Rails. I hope that people who download it (when I make it available) find any bugs and report them, so I can make sure everything’s working fine. Currently, I’m not yet entirely sure it will be useful for anyone, and therefore I’m not putting it online yet, but I probably will in future (once there’s some way to change the title to something different than “JW” and the administrator doesn’t have to be user “admin” with password “admin”).
In future, I also plan to add more advanced type management, with a good interface to install and enable types. Some mechanism for theming is also still needed, and is planned for addition in one of the next versions. And of course, I’ll also add plugins somewhere in the future.
