Flutterby™! : Embedded blog app? 2004-07-09 23:30:32.461896+00

Embedded blog app?

2004-07-09 23:30:32.461896+00 by Shawn 6 comments

Okay, so I've finally made the decision to add a blog, or something very like a blog, to my personal site as part of an upcoming redesign. Thing is, I'm having a little trouble finding something that will meet my needs:

I don't have shell access to the server my site is on, so this precludes anything that requires extra stuff being installed (like Perl modules). I've got PHP, Perl and MySQL available to me.
I don't want to replace my entire site, or even an entire page, with a full-featured blog site. I just simply want to post entries and let people comment on them - and I want to embed that functionality into a page of my design. Categories for my posts would be nice, but I can probably live without that initially (but would also make access to the source fairly important.)

From what I'm seeing available out there, it looks like I'm gonna have to build something myself, but I figured I'd check to see if anybody else has seen what I'm looking for first.

Shawn, I've started using WordPress. It should meet at least most of your requirements. It runs on PHP and MySQL and hasn't required any modules that wasn't already on the webserver I'm running it on. It would be worth a look, any way.

Shawn, play with PHP and MySQL.. a simple Blog is an ideal app for these tools. You'll be rewarded with something that YOU control and can play with.

#Comment Re: made: 2004-07-10 23:10:58.745631+00 by: Shawn [edit history]

Larry; thanks for the recommendation. They don't have any screenshots of the front-end, but it sounds like pretty much everything else - that it encompasses the entire page. And that's really the primary requirement I have. I don't want a page that's a blog, I want a page that has a blog in it. The blog shouldn't care, or even be aware of, the other parts of the page. It should just live happily in the space allocated for it - the center column, the lower right corner, etc. I'll give WordPress a try (I like the admin interface), though and see what can be done about shoe-horning it in to my vision.

meuon; my PHP skills are strong, and more so for MySQL. Time is the issue. With a 4+ hour commute each day I'm left with precious little of it :-(

Shawn, one script, wp.php, that is included in the WordPress distribution has the core of what you would need in a webpage to pull the articles out of the database. It requires the core script for the functions it uses but that would be all you would need to include in your webpage. The index.php script that comes with the distribution has all the added parts that I don't think you are wanting.

I haven't had the opportunity to play with it much more than just getting it running yet but I liked what I got. After I get a project at work out of the way I intend to see what I can do with the scripts to get some things out that I've been wanting for my weblog but didn't have the perl knowledge, or time to attain it, to do using Blosxom.

Me too, meuon, me too. Hopefully we'll be able to do something about it in the coming months, though.