Work on Blog 7.0 is actually progressing much faster than I thought! (I really shouldn’t be surprised since this usually seems to be the way things go with any project I undertake – I say it’ll take a long time, I then do it really quickly and then it goes in to a long beta cycle and it still ends up taking a long time :p) I’ve completed the code on the digest feature – which will allow Blog in Server mode to send out a weekly or monthly digest of entries to subscribed users – and the remote comments – which allows users to have comments on their blog with no need for PHP or ASP or Perl or any other software on their server -. There are a bunch of new Blog tags to accommodate all of these new features. I’ve also added a backup option to allow people to backup their Blog data files and a repair option for them to repair a damaged data file from within Blog itself. Of course, I’m not going to be able to test the repair option completely and so will have to go with it on faith :p
While that’s a whole bunch of new features, that’s not all that I want to do for Blog 7.0 🙂 I want to add an entry category feature which allows you to categorize your entries and to display archives by category. There are a couple of minor questions/problems there. The first problem is that I’ll need to do a UI change to accommodate the category and the main Blog screen is crowded enough as it is :p Guess, I’ll probably have to either shorten the title field and put it as a drop down next to it or create a new slide out panel which hides the preview pane until you click the preview button. But the next question is about the category feature itself – while it would be fairly simple to tag an entry as belonging to a particular category, I don’t think it would be that simple in practice. I know that in my posts I talk about various things, so how can I be content with only one category per entry? The ideal situation would be to have multiple categorizations per entry but that could turn out to be a coding nightmare :p Guess I’ll first have to see how best I can do the coding and then go with the easiest option for the moment …