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
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
