Feb 16 2004

Moved to Blogman V2

Published by at 14:07 under Wayback Archive

This weekend I upgraded this site to Blogman V2. The upgrade was relatively easy and I am happy with the new stuff. There is a nice upgrade feature that imports all the old posts and comments into the new system. I had to spend the most time on adding new features and making the move to the new system search engine friendly..

Upgrading

The most important change between V1 and V2 is that the application is not using XML anymore to store all entries, posts etc. I do have the impression that at least the admin part of the tool has become much faster because of this.

However, now all the pages are generated on the fly whilst the old system did spit out static HTML files for each post. I am not sure what the impact of this will be, but I do not expect any problems because of this.

A bigger ‘problem’ related to this is search engine indexing; the search engines now all link to the V1 HTML files. I did not want to keep those files on the server because comments etc would be posted into the old system (which I removed) and that would cause some ‘organisational’ problems. So I used a little trick; I kept all the old files but replaced the code with a script that maps the old pages to the new pages. This way people coming from the search engines will still be able to see the pages, but they do have the V2 content in front of them. So far it seems to work fine.

An other thing to be aware of is the fact that the layout mechanism has changed a littlebit. I tweaked the standard layout to incorporate this DW CSS sample look, and I had to do that again in V2.

Custom features

I have the impression that the engine behind V2 is easier to understand than the one behind V1. A few tweaks that I have made:

  • Originally the calendar always showed the current month. I wanted it to display the month in which the post you are viewing was made and thus made it like that with just 4 lines of additional code.
  • I was not happy with the fact that comments were shown in a popup instead of below the blog item. In my opinion having the comments in the same page triggers people to read them and comment as well (instead of first having a popup open). I made it so that the comments now are shown below a post in detailed view. This tweak was easy as well; just include comments.cfm, make some minor code changes and that’s it.
  • The admin did not have a WYSIWYG editor. And because I hate writing XHTML by hand I just incorporated Massimo Foti his CF XHTML Editor, which is a great little custom tag!
  • A fix a few minor bugs / features that I did not like (for example the archives list had an incorrect order)

I’ve still got a few things on my wish list (especially a RIA for the backend, maybe using Flex) but for now I am very happy. Please report any issues that you find to me. The thing I am most worried about are the automated emails; there are some settings in the SMTP server that seem to break some of the email functionality (mostly to do with domain issues).

Anyway, enjoy!

4 responses so far

4 Responses to “Moved to Blogman V2”

  1. Scott Barnes says:
    17 February 2004 at 3:03

    Did you find the Import feature to be useless to the point where sure it moves all the core data over to V2, but forgets the relationships between posts and comments?

    V1 from a UID based Primary key to a Integer based, and the import doesn’t adhere to this.

    Furthermore, I found it frustration as well that the Primary Keys relied on Auto-number, thus having to go through each table and update the field and put autonumbering on..

    Q.A was lost on the import I think.

  2. Waldo Smeets says:
    17 February 2004 at 7:59

    Hi Scott, my comments were imported fine. The only problem (see other posts) with comments is that they are deleted when updating a post. I also liked the fact that the old UID still is stored in the database, I used it to make the update backwards compatible with search engines.

    I agree with the autonumbering but for me it’s more of a technical performance issue which in this case is not that important; at least it should be something that you go through only once 😉

  3. Scott Barnes says:
    17 February 2004 at 8:05

    maybe i have a different version? but the “related” entries didn’t carry through to v2?

    As for the autonumber, yeah it was a pain to migrated from Access to SQL, but luckily enough its only got a few tables 🙂

  4. Waldo Smeets says:
    17 February 2004 at 8:10

    Ah you are referring to the related entries. Sorry, I did not have any defined so I did not experience that problem either.

    ps: The reason that I never use them is because it’s a pain to find the right post in that use list that you can choose from. If time permits I’ll try to build something better for this.