Basically the problem is that Xoops and bBlog both wants to control Smarty. And I have to do a lot of coding around that if it’s ever going to work very well.

I still have my progress in Subversion tho. And I just noticed a new version of bBlog has been released for me to toy with so I might try that.

That being said I think it might be more productive to take a working Xoops blog module (like the now – seemingly dead – WebLog module) and then just add some of the missing functionality to it (like remote APIs). All in all it seems like less work.

Also there is a new blog module in development on dev.xoops.org that might be getting under way. So perhaps I should just get into that instead…

Ah well. It’s how life is. I’m trying to do some inline php in the templates to set it up. But I can’t figure out if there is access to the current Smarty object from inside a smarty template page so I hack around it for now. In the future of Xoops they have promised this precompile will go away. Making life much easier for me… Although it would have been nice if a plugin could acturlly define it’s smarty plugin locations. But then Xoops use Smarty but isn’t too Smarty centric (some people in the Xoops dev forum, on Sourceforge, are even suggesting going back to raw php in Xoops 3 for some reason).

Anyway. Apart from that I’ve started considering if I should do another OO patch for bBlog. I’d like to split the user info into a class of it’s own. Currently that kind of info is retrieved by joins in SQL. And it’s making it a bit hard to use Xoops user info instead (it’s doable but messy). Shouldn’t take too long either since bBlog don’t expect a consistent source of user date. So it’s not used in a lot of places.

Even with Zend Studio PHP development isn’t my favorite past-time activity. The language is so weakly typed it’s impossible to know if you messed up stuff unless you actually go through the entire site and try out everything. And when you are used to re-factoring Java code with tools like Eclipse. Doing it with search and replace just isn’t too much fun.

Ah well. But now I got it done I can get back to improve my Xoops integration. Most stuff should be doable in a subclass of the bBlog one now. So I just have to change the line in init.php where an instance of the bBlog class is initialized. And replace it with my own.

The nice thing is it don’t really take that long and that I’m pretty much done with it… I think. I still need to do some more testing before I submit the patch tho. Another nice thing is I got a reason to try out the ‘official’ PHP IDE: Zend Studio. Obviously it’s MUCH better than any of the Eclipse plugins I’ve been using so far. With it’s integrated full debug environment that works as well as any you would find in, say, a C or Java IDE. And the code completion is very good considering we are working with a very weakly typed language. For hobby use I’m not sure I’ll sink money into a PHP IDE tho. It’s not like I enjoy PHP enough to do more of it than I do now

On a side note I also tried to make some xmlrpc clients to work with my bBlog module. And so far I have only had w.Blogger working. All Palm based ones I have tried have barfed (and more common than not proceeded to require a reset of the device). Also the Mac OS X ones I tried didn’t work. So it seems I may have to look into what’s going on with the xmlrpc code at some point too. Unless it’s just my mods that has screwed it all up.

The current bBlog version is .7.3 and that’s what I’m using. It isn’t very integration friendly. But making it work in Xoops wasn’t too hard either. Only trouble is if I’m going to have to make it work with Xoops users instead of it’s own ‘authors’ table since it does a bit of hardcoded sql with table joining to get information for building pages.

So that’s why I’m not going to release the module just yet. It’s too dirty. The admin interface hasn’t been wrapped in the Xoops admin interface. Permissions on bBlogs own smarty cache has to be manually fixed after install (gotta get it to use the one Xoops has – should be trivial but it’s not gonna be tonight). And finally there is the whole users thing I mentioned.

I’m also trying to wrap some of the bBlog plugin/blocks into some Xoops blocks. But it’s a bit tricky since bBlog expects it’s own Smarty object and the code don’t work well with how Xoops integrates Smarty… But I’ll get that ironed out eventually