I am well and truly in the throes of creating another app :p The BlogMan prototype is coming along pretty well and I was actually able to connect to my Movable Type server yesterday and retrieve information about my blogs there. Retrieving posts and making posts is still going to take about a week to finish but we’re getting there. Of course, I’m already beginning to notice certain things such as the fact that I will probably need to either create a plug-in architecture or a separate API file since apart from the core Blogger API, Movable Type also seems to implement other access methods for features it has but Blogger doesn’t – such as the category feature. A plug-in architecture probably is the best since then I can support almost any blog server with XML-RPC capabilities but for the moment, I’m too lazy to do that and will probably go with a straight API file but keep the plug-in idea in mind. I won’t say more till I have actually gotten some of the other stuff to work since I have certain reservations but not sure if they are well founded or not.
I’ve also heard a few comments about Blog 7.0 linefeed conversion feature 🙂 Now, I had not even considered putting more than basic HTML formatting in my entries but I see that Rob has been using tables – sometimes I feel as if I am the person who least uses all the features/possibilities of Blog :p The easiest way not to have the linefeeds automatically insert line break tags into your tables is to have the table code and the contents in one complete line with no breaks at all. Yes, I realize that looks totally ugly and is hard to debug when a problem occurs but it will definitely keep the line break tags from appearing. The other thing I can think of is to use some sort of a new tag which will mark certain areas as non-parseable by Blog so that its completely bypassed by the Blog tag/linefeed parser. This might however, slow things down a bit and so there’s going to be a bit of a tradeoff in speed for clarity of entry.
Since so many people seem to be in favour of the calendar idea – I guess plug-ins are a definite feature to be implemented in the next major release of Blog. But just because I create a plug-in system, don’t expect me to create the calendar plug-in :p I might or might not since I’m way too lazy <vbg> I might simply convert the cookie tag into a plug-in, release the source and expect somebody else to do the actual work :p Of course, thinking about a plug-in architecture has brought up certain other difficulties that I had not considered at first. Blog relies heavily on database access but the plug-in creators might not have access to DBISAM to do any development work – so that means that I’ll probably have to create an internal Blog API which gives plug-in authors transparent access to the Blog databases. I am currently thinking of making it a simple function which takes an SQL statement and returns the results for the query as a variant array. Not sure if that will actually work since I haven’t tried it out yet but I’d like any input on the idea from the other developers out there. Anybody? 🙂
At first glance, your interface idea should work just fine since any type of plug-in really should only need to access the data via some form of query anyway.