Hari's Corner

I've been planning to write my own blog software using PHP 5 and SQLite for a while now, but it's been on the backburner as I've not even had time to update this blog recently.

However, I've been working on the idea and have come up with a "road-map" of ideas to work on. The base idea is to keep it clean, non-bloated and with only the features I will require. The code, of course, will be released under GNU/GPL when I'm done.

So here's a list of ideas/features in no particular order for my own reference as well as for those who might be interested:

• Single user, single blog engine. No complex user-access controls. Just one admin user for blog administration and content management
• Very lightweight. No usage of a client-server database engine or use of excessive PHP for processing data.
• Keep the SQL commands used simple, understandable and reliable.
• Categorization to be kept simple: single category per post and no nested categories. Suitable for most purposes
• Very basic blog search. Enough for most purposes.
• Customizable publish/draft mode for articles and ability to moderate or even turn off comments.
• Include RSS/Atom for posts as well as for comments.
• Pseudo-clean URL support. Not full-fledged "HTMLized" URLs like other blog platforms (that would add more code complexity and supporting at least 2 different types of URLs - one failsafe URL mechanism which doesn't require Apache's mod_rewrite.)
• Split most of the code into multiple files. Avoid complex coding in a single PHP file. Separate form content from action as much as possible.
• No usage of HTML template files for "skinning". Using a separate templating system makes coding easier, but it adds more overheads to the PHP engine.
• Easily navigable archives.
• Try to keep most of the static content in HTML to improve performance. Therefore no separate feature called "blogroll" just to implement what is basically a list of links that is infrequently updated.
• Keep the code-base modern and full in PHP 5. No backward compatibility with PHP 4. PHP 5 just has too many cool features to ignore.
• Try and keep the whole project (excluding images/database size) within 500 KB or at the most 700 KB.

In other words, my blog software will have none of the frills found in other blog systems like multi-language support, AJAX, WYSIWYG editors, tagging, file/image uploads (which are insecure anyway), pinging, pingbacks, trackbacks, static pages, dashboard statistics, multiple skins/themes (most of the visual aspects of a website can be edited within the CSS file 90% of the time), multiple users with different permission levels, user registration (used mostly by spammers anyway), drag-and-drop widgets, calendar displays, etc.

In other words, this blog software will be tailored to the blogger who knows a bit of HTML and PHP, is willing to edit CSS and configuration files, knows a bit about FTP or SSH for file transfer and needs a no-frills, fully functional blogging system.