about plogit
published on 14.11.2005 by xir
a very small, easy blog/cms. based on xml/rss files. no database, no web-scripting.
plogit is especially designed for low performance servers. mainly freaky sysadmins and
other funny persons are using such engines for example as chatserver or other community
tools. in some cases this are old ibm or sun machines or other fancy stuff.
so plogit's maingoal is to provide a system for small and private blog-pages
without the need of databases and webscriptings. the maingoal for the author is/was
to wreak a little perl ...
it works just with a cupple of xml-files providing the content.
this files are written by vi, mc or any other shell-editor.
plogit creates html-files out of the pvovided contents using
perl's html-template engine. for endusers it should be easy to handle, without any
programming knowledge.
so what ... i started to write this tool actually just for fun. i started on a rainy
sunday. there was no need to leave the house. just to get cigaretts and food. i did
different steps but got horrible performance problems. the first version, i tried on
daemon.nethack.at created the pages on the fly, which needed around 30 seconds to get
a page in a browser. because of this i created something like a caching system. the
current version just uses plog.pl to create a cupple of html-files and write them directly
into the filesystem. i think this is the right way for future versions too.
i don't have tons of perl experience. i realy hope it's no WORN code in the system.
if you find parts in the code to enhance, download and correct it, or just
send me your ideas.
if you are interested in doing some work for this thingy just for fun, we should
think about svn or cvs to bring all changes together. i realy would love if
some people will help to bring it up. maybe just with the idea behind to practice a
little perl ...
technical description
plog uses two special perl modules and a cupple of perl coremodules. config.pm is
the main configuration of the system. right now there are still some missing
attributes. i use fixed values in the plog.pl script which is the main executable
script. the second module is plog.pm which resides under modules/plog.pm. the plan is
to include all logical methods needed by the system in this module.
under templates/default/ you find the html-templates for webpages. they are done with
perls template engine. i'm not realy happy about this, but i didn't know any better
templating in perl. in future steps it would be better to find a more advanced
engine. last thing i have found is an exention to this system called:
HTML::Template::Expr. i will try it within the next days.
used perl core modules
XML::RSS; # perl rss-parser
XML::Parser; # perl xml-parser
HTML::Template; # perl html-templates
CGI qw(:all); # use as cgi for weboutput
POSIX; # posix setting
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