About bBlog

From BBlog

bBlog Features

• Free blogging under the GPL!
• PHP and MySQL driven
• Smarty (http://smarty.php.net/)-centric
  • That is, bBlog not only uses Smarty for templates and plugins, but as much as possible adheres to the design philosophy of the Smarty system
  • Smarty templates make it easy to change the look of your blog without modifying any PHP source code, and enforce a modular architecture that separates presentation and formatting from the application logic behind it
• Template driven with easy to modify templates
• Completely configurable appearance
• Plugins to change the way text is formatted, and to provide many other features such as quote engines or photoblogging
• Metaweblog compatible xml-rpc server, so you can use w.bloggar to blog remotely!
• Included plugins:
  • Threaded comments
  • BBCode
  • Textile
  • Calendar
  • Blogroll
  • Referrers
  • ... more to come
• OO style code, making bBlog fast, clean (easy to modify) and secure
• Active and efficient development!
• Nice looking :)

bBlog Requirements

• Web server with PHP and MySQL installed and configured
• Read/Write Access to a MySQL database

Why Smarty

• Separate Design
  • Change your blog design without touching core bBlog code
  • Edit the templates all you want, but the code stays intact, and you won't introduce hard-to-find bugs to the bBlog code
• Separate Development
  • bBlog developers won't change your look and feel, and plugins are truly modular
  • The bBlog developers can change the way content is generated, and you can download new plugins or update your bBlog engine code without disturbing the presentation layer of your blog, with your carefully crafted look and feel
• Simple Maintenance
  • No temptation to make "quick hack" PHP additions to your templates that end up tying your code up into a hard-to-edit, hard-to-debug mess over the long term
• Error Handling
  • Errors in templates are handled by Smarty and bBlog error handling routines
  • This makes tracking down and handling problems as simple and intuitive as possible to deal with for the blog user
• Good Performance
  • Smarty templates are compiled to PHP, so there's no meaningful performance penalty like you might get from interpreted template systems
• Powerful Caching
  • Smarty also has a powerful caching mechanism that allows automatic caching of your pages, which you can control or limit where desirable
  • Using Smarty caching in a write-sometimes, view-often system like a blog, you can get much faster, more responsive page views and handle higher load than even a raw PHP system!
• For a more complete discussion, see Why Use Smarty (http://smarty.php.net/whyuse.php)

How to refer to bBlog

• bBlog is always one word with the second letter capitalized
• bBlog is pronounced "bee blog"