Tag: Wordform

Following the open source mantra of “release early, release often”, I’ve uploaded the first alpha release of Wordform. You can access it from SourceForge.

You’ll want to backup before using this, and install the application in a database separate from your production environment.

You’ll need to edit config.php to match your database information and also add in the siteurl for the URL of the weblog. If you move the installation, you’ll need to change this value.

The install files are in /admin/install and are pretty simple. If you’re making a copy of your existing WordPress database (not using your production one, of course), it should upgrade fine. But this is early alpha, so anything goes.

For creating static files, set the static subdirectory to world writable. To have the system manage your .htaccess file, make it writable by the world.

I recommend this release only for developers and those experienced with early releases. You can add bug reports at SourceForge, but if you have installation problems, you might want to add a comment here or send me an email.

A more stable release will go out at end of week, and I hope to make new releases weekly, as well as use the CVS facilities. When I release at the end of the week, I’ll release a separate package with just those files that have changed between alpha-01 and alpha-02.

I’ve ported all of my weblogs to Wordform and it went nicely. I’ve been doing clean up on the files, some separation of processing and presentation, and finishing up the metadata extension, but Wordform 1.0a should be ready for download in next couple of days.

The files will be changing in alpha release. I’m still in the process of separating the data and the processing layers, and I’m sure there will be bugs, and perhaps even new functionaliy. However, I’ll provide a special install to upgrade alpha and better testers, without having to replace their modified templates.

The feeds were a little screwed up, but should be fine, now.

Home stretch. Rah. Home stretch.

In the last 24 hours, I managed to get three major components of Wordform finished. Go me.

The first was the external application-via-plugin dashboard that allows user-selected filler. With this you can use one or more plugins to provide whatever you want within the dashboard area. For instance, I currently have a list of updated posts through my Feed-on-Feed installation, as well as a list of updated posts from the Burningbird weblogs.

The second was getting the Meta option to work. If you access the individual posts or pages within the site, and there’s metadata defined for them, the RDF/XML is returned. I still have to finish the interface for adding the data, but it shouldn’t be complicated. You can see my test cases at http://weblog.burningbird.net/me/rdf/ and here. I’ll add code to create a link to the files in the header, and another option whereby if you pass in ‘meta’ rather than ‘rdf’, you’ll get an HTML table of the information, in human viewable format.

With this functionality, if anyone wants to provide metadata support for a specific vocabulary, such as Creative Commons or the Vegetarian schema (yes, true schema), all they have to do is create a plugin that provides the HTML for the form fields (to enable the user to fill in the blanks on the statements) and make some simple API calls to process the data. From the advanced editing page, an option listing all available schemas (as plugins) is provided and clicking on one opens up the form to grab the data and update the database. Once metadata has been created for a page or a post, attaching a ‘/rdf/’ or ‘/meta/’ to the permalink for either returns the formatted data.

No more worries about putting the data into comments in XHTML. No more worries about combining data from different schemas, since it’s all RDF/XML.

The final option I finished today was fulltext, which you can see in the last post.

Still lots of work to do, but these were the three big infrastructure items left. Onwards.

Just a quick FYI in how this is going:

I need to integrate fulltext in the application. This allows people to view a single page in a multi-page posting.

I’m still trying to get the RDF meta-data component finished, using RAP (RDF API for PHP). Some troubles with data updates.

Still hunting down SQL statements that have been embedded in the process files, and isolating them in the backend.

Few other odds and ends. I had thought about not worrying about multi-blog support, but I think I will add this in, after all. I think all in all it would be easier to add it in from the beginning then to try and incorprate after the tool’s been used.

Lot’s of work. Most of it fun. Really like the metadata thing, and consider the discussion about datablogging timely, too. It’s not going to be that polished, though, because the metadata functionality will be an add on, whereby people provide a vocabulary and the functionality enables it for each post. But I agree with Danny: this is the perfect use for RDF/XML.