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Blogging: Alternatives - SimplePHPBlog

Blogging is becoming a de rigeur asynchronous communication methodology. So, wanting to participate in the "digital revolution" with some ability to "add value", I want to set up a Weblog that can be used locally and stays within the school's intranet sandbox. There are options.

There is at least one alternative to setting up a Weblog: find other suitable Weblog software and install it on a local server. Most people who set up their own local weblog site install something like the venerable open source software suite Wordpress. It is based on php scripts and using a MySQL 4+ database engine to manage stored information. As a consequence the code is relatively complicated but well developed and well supported, and I might add very easy to install. Many "plug-in" functions are available. Some people (who have a Mac Server) also look towards activating the wiki/blog software that comes with the server suite.

Alternatives

An alternative is to look for free/ open source software that is simpler, and uses a flat file (ie. text files) for storing information. Security and selective access relies directly on the native underlying operating system. This may or may not be an advantage if security is a major issue. After making it functional you can then modify the code to suit your specific purposes. One of the first things most people will do is customise the look and feel or redo the "skin"- colours, size of text, information arrangement on the screen etc.

An excellent and highly configurable weblog suite, using php and text files, is SimplePHPBlog from Alexander Palmo. It is self installing, that is, when you copy the unpacked folder to your Web Server (eg. root folder), and visit <web branch>.index.php it takes you through a one time install process. The way in which it deals with the initial password security issue is interesting.

The best way to get it going on a production server is to do the initial build and setup on a "test server" and then copy to a production server. In this way there is no administrator security issue. Only the already encrypted password data is uploaded.

Features I like about this weblog suite:

• generally well written, relatively small and so can be easily modified, extended and integrated with other software; my main motivation for trying it
• simple (common form) user interface that can be easily customised, including embedding in other software
• comes with a small, but interesting set of skins (colour combinations can be really easily customised), that are easily selected
• excellent very well explained guidance text for configuration and set up (there are a number of interesting options).
• Few dependencies (php 5.x) and only makes use of raw text files within its own folder.
• Delete its folder and it goes.
• I guess will work with any Web server- certainly with Apache 2.0+.
• Appears to be actively supported, and a user has explained some esoteric security issues.
• relatively fast, especially if you turn on file compression.

Worth experimenting with.