I've decided to rewrite Bluetrait.
It's had a good run.
Getnews (the blog script that I wrote before Bluetrait) was aimed at providing a very basic blog with commenting support. It did this well, but a lot of it was hardcoded to my domain/style so it wasn't really useful for anyone else.
I wrote Bluetrait 1 as to allow others to easily use/install it. It had/has a very basic template type system. Over the revisions it has been slowly upgraded and now includes:
It has worked well on my site for almost 3 years! But it has some limitations that are starting to annoy me. The biggest problem I currently have with it is the way the CMS side works.
There is no way to categories pages and as my project page grows it is becoming an issue.
So I'm going to take what I've learnt with Bluetrait 1 and rewrite it.
I'm aiming to make Bluetrait 2 able to cope with all kinds of content for example:
The idea is that the core of Bluetrait will have a section that allows people to design their own plugins which allows the system to handle any kind of data output.
Bluetrait 2 will also require PHP 5 as I'm using the PDO database class to allow for almost any kind of database (mysql, sql lite etc).
So the coding has started. Plugin support is almost done. I don't expect to have anything finished this year, hopefully early next year.
I just read an interesting post here about what data is sent to the Akismet servers. A surprising amount, including the whole $_SERVER array!
I wouldn't be too happy with that myself. Bluetrait's implementation of the Akismet client sends the following information:
Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)
Bluetrait's implementation sends the following information:
Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)
Plus the $_SERVER array with the following information removed:
'HTTP_COOKIE',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST',
'HTTP_MAX_FORWARDS',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER',
'REDIRECT_STATUS',
'SERVER_PORT',
'PATH',
'DOCUMENT_ROOT',
'SERVER_ADMIN',
'QUERY_STRING',
'PHP_SELF' ;
Unfortunately this is more than I first stated, I'm going to review the data being sent. It shouldn't contain any extra data that is personal.
EDIT: Some more info here. Looks like Akismet sends the all cookies that are from that domain. i.e anything the client (the person posting the comment) is logged into. The post is a bit old (2005) so this behavior may have changed.
EDIT2: I just checked the source code from WordPress 2.1.2 it looks like cookies are no longer sent, everything else still is.
Argh. Too much spam is getting through again; even with Akismet. So I'm in the process of writing a new spam class. The aim is to build a comment score (similar to email spam filtering programs) based on the following:
So hopefully I can cut down the spam.
I suspect trying to have both a blog called Bluetrait and a piece of blog software called Bluetrait is a bad idea...
Things I'd like to add:
Bluetrait 0.4.9 is now out. This version provides some bug fixes over BETA 1 (Think of it as BETA 1 Release 2).
The following have been fixed from BETA 1:
The full change log can be seen here.
I haven't had the chance to work on the code for this site for a while, been pretty busy with uni. Anyway I have a week off (some Faculty of IT thing, not uni wide) which is cool. I did a touch up on some code tonight. I'm now running version 0.3.9 of my code. 0.3.8 added the following:
I'd like to release something at version 0.4.0 but we'll see. If I release it at that version it probably still isn't ready for general use. But I'll get there slowly.