The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

Presenting the Pivot Live Archive Explorer

'Listed on Designers Who Blog''New Year's Resolutions'

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Friday Dec 23 2005

Just before I'll dive into the christmas days I finished a special christmas present for all of you Pivot webloggers: The Pivot Live Archive Explorer. With this new Pivot plugin your visitors will be able to browse your archives in true Web 2.0 style with some nifty AJAX love! Of course an example says more than a thousand words which is why you're invited to try out my Archive Explorer page to see what this plugin can do.

The Plugin is powered by Backbase community edition. As far as I know it might very well be the first Backbase powered weblog plugin. The code is fairly clean and I've done some nice testing with Simon to iron out some last wrinkles. Like with any first release however there might be some loose ends here and there.

In the near future (when the Pivot version is completely finalized) I plan to release a WordPress version of this plugin as well. Stay tuned for that on my WordPress blog

last updated: 03-01-2006. current version: 1.0 beta 3

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How to install

First things first: Get the plugin!

Installation is fairly straightforward. I've included a README.txt but for easy reference I'll rephrase it in this posting.

Get Backbase Community Edition
Install Backbase in your webserver root. You only need to install the production files. If you end up with a working Backbase kit installed on http://www.yourserver.com/Backbase you're ready for the next step
Copy the directory explorer/ you'll find inside the zip archive into your Backbase/3_1_1/controls/ directory
Copy the directory archive-explorer/ you'll find inside the zip archive into Pivot's extensions/snippets/ directory
Copy snippet_archive_explorer.php into your extensions/snippets/ directory
Create make a new 'dummy' category in Pivot Admin Categories, with a different name to any you already have in your existing categories. Then create a NEW weblog in your Pivot Admin Weblogs, with everything set to NO or disabled. No archives, no feeds, nothing! Configure this new weblog to publish to the new 'dummy' category. Make sure you set 'Live entries' to NO for this weblog. Use %title%.php in the 'Filename' field.

Post a new entry to your new weblog, selecting to publish in new 'dummy' category. Make the title simple: 'livearchives' for example. You don't need to post any text (unless you want to add some description babble), just use this template tag:

[[archive_explorer]]
Rebuild the frontpage(s) and you'll have you your live archives page at:
http://www.yourhost.com/path/livearchives.php

(leave out the 'path' part if your blog lives in your server root)

I hope you'll enjoy this new plugin! Please report bugs if you find them. Comments are more than welcome! After I release version 1.0 I will be publishing a full writeup on how I built this plugin including my (very nice) experience with Backbase Community Edition.

Happy New Year!

Marco

Updates

I'll edit this part of the posting whenever there's something new to tell.

I have updated the zip again. We're at beta 3 now. Note that you MUST use Backbase 3.1.1 now.

Latest changes:

Introduced a new tab called 'Everything' which holds all posts ever created in a Backbase Livegrid (very cool!)
Fixed a bug causing januari 2006 to show no posts in the by date tab
Fixed a bug causing items in hidden categories to be shown (thanks Bram!)
Improved notice for incompatible browsers
Some UI tweaks
Various smaller fixes

Known problems to fix before 1.0:

On some blogs the 'everything' tab doesn't show posts. Still trying to figure this one out...
Post list is not updated yet when changing the year in the 'by date' tab.
There are still some issues with entities

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Commentary

Join the discussion! Leave a comment through the comment form below!

At 23 December '05 - 11:14 Bram wrote:
It’s almost working perfectly! First of all the newest version of Backbase used a different subdirectory name (3_1_1 instead of 3_1) so I had to rename it on my webserver.
Secondly, the plugin isn’t showing any years or months to browse through, see here: http://bram.nijmeijer.org/livearchives.p.. . What’s going wrong here?

And my last question; is it possible to change the width of the plugin? Resizing the iframe doesn’t do the trick as you’ve probably already seen
At 23 December '05 - 11:16 Bram wrote:
[wine mode] This post is submitted at 20:16 CET [wine mode]
At 24 December '05 - 02:17 Simon wrote:
Happy holidays to you as well Marco! And thanks for this little present, good to hear you’re going to build it for WP as well .

However, I spotted another bug (like I posted on the forum). If you need my help again, well, you know where to find me… .
At 24 December '05 - 04:03 Bakkel wrote:
Works like a charme! The only thing missing is the month november 2005?? strange!

Happy holidays mate!
At 26 December '05 - 05:09 Marco wrote:
Hi Michel that’s really weird!
For some reason the code seems to think you don’t have any posts in that month… I’d have to debug that together with you when you have some time on MSN because at this point I can’t tell why this happens on your weblog. It’s either a Pivot problem and/or a combination of the Pivot related code in this plugin and Pivot itself.

At this point I can only say one thing for sure: It has nothing to do with the backbase / ajax part.
At 28 December '05 - 09:06 jan-willem wrote:
Thanks a lot Marco, for another great Pivot plugin!!
At 28 December '05 - 10:38 jan-willem wrote:
Some feedback now that I have installed beta 3. The Everything tab does not show any posts. The other tabs work fine but some posts are just missing. for example the posts of the first week of december 05 don’t show up if you search based on month, but do show up if you search on category or search word?
At 28 December '05 - 10:44 Marco wrote:
I have spotted the problem. It’s entity characters screwing up your XML feed. I have to do a filter to get rid of those.
At 29 December '05 - 00:59 Marco wrote:
I added a routine to convert the entities to unicode ones. I hope it works better now!
At 29 December '05 - 03:36 Hans wrote:
I’ve posted this one in the Pivot Forum already :

Hi Marco,

i’ve just installed the beta 3 version of Archive Explorer, and i must say IT’S GREAT !

The only bug i’ve found was in the Search function. When i’m typing Wijlre nothing is found, but when i’m typing wijlre, some entries are found, even entries with Wijlre in it.

The same problem i’ve seen in Bramn-weblog, http://bram.nijmeijer.org/livearchives.p.., with searching for Pivot or pivot.

regards,
Hans
http://weblog.hanssenden.nl/livearchief...
At 29 December '05 - 11:56 jan-willem wrote:
Hi Marco,

Your solution to the problem with the Everything section seems to be succesful. All post appear normaly now. The only thing I still can’t figure out is why certain post are not shown in the month search, but do show up if searched by category or search word? Once again thanks for all the hard word you’ve been putting into this.
At 02 January '06 - 14:21 jan-willem wrote:
For some reason the new posts in january 2006 no longer show up in the search by date category.
At 03 January '06 - 05:21 Marco wrote:
That’s fixed now. Thanks for reporting!
At 15 January '06 - 09:01 jan-willem wrote:
For some reason the posts for 31/12/05 do not show up in the date category?
At 03 February '06 - 15:38 jan-willem wrote:
Marco,

Did you notice the search funtionality is no longer working in live archive explorer on both our weblogs?
At 04 February '06 - 01:36 Marco wrote:
@jan willem> Eh… no?
I just checked and it works fine here… I searched for ‘php’ and results came up just fine.
At 04 February '06 - 02:46 jan-willem wrote:
Weird.. It’s working fine again on my weblog as well???
At 04 February '06 - 03:14 Marco wrote:
Well I guess you had some hiccup in your browser then. It can’t have fixed itself, can it?
At 15 April '06 - 07:36 sander kessels wrote:
Unfortunately your browser does not support Backbase which powers this section of this website. Currently supported browsers are Firefox/Mozilla (any platform) and Internet Explorer 5 and up (PC)

Hum… ben geen voorstander om technieken die niet platformonafhankelijk zijn te gebruiken (ik gebruik Safari- Mac)
At 01 May '06 - 17:02 jan-willem wrote:
Since upgrading to the latest Pivot version 1.30 RC2: Rippersnapper the search by date function no longer shows the months and years. The only posts shown are the ones posted since the update. The other search options work fine. Any ideas???
At 08 May '06 - 02:11 Marco wrote:
At the moment: no. I’ll try to look into it soon but no promises. Kinda busy period coming up for me!
At 22 May '06 - 13:55 jan-willem wrote:
Until then I’ll just keep my fingers crossed

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Live archief
Marco heeft weer een nieuw speeltje in elkaar geflanst voor ons Pivot-gebruikers. Op deze pagina vind je een live archief van dit weblog gemaakt in AJAX met Backbase als achterkant. Als je hem de eerste keer opvraag zal er een zeer kleine vertraging zijn …Sent on 24 December '05 - 04:22 , via Bakkel's weblog

Live archive explorer for Pivot blogs
Marco van Hylckama Vlieg has created a widget for a dynamic view of Pivot blog archives. For details read his blog entry, or check out the widget running on his blog. It takes advantage of a nice live table where rows are loading on the fly as you s…Sent on 06 January '06 - 13:05 , via Ajaxian

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