A short note to say that Jan Hackel has released Products.Quills and Products.QuillsEnabled and version 1.7.0c1-post1. These are release candidates, with the 'post1' reflecting a couple of minor bug fixes that arose shortly after the initial rc1 release.

They're up on pypi. Give them a go!

Jan Hackel has been making great leaps forward with the quills codebase recently.  After fixing several important bugs, he released (in egg form) 1.7.0b3 versions of Products.Quills and Products.QuillsEnabled a few weeks ago.  (We forgot to announce it at the time.)

Since then, if anything, Jan has picked up the pace - as can be seen from the 'resolved' issues log in the tracker! Pending issues appear to be mainly feature requests (i.e. not for 1.7) or problems to do with remote blogging (i.e. not core). Still, Jan is working on the latter already, so they may yet be fixed before 1.7.0 is released... which should be soon :).

... yes, I'm aware that if we do make it to 1.7.0, it'll be the first 'final' release since 0.9. Quills has been 'beta' for too long, but things are looking much better now and the test coverage is really very good now.

I've just released QuillsEnabled 1.7.0b2 onto pypi.  You should be able to add it to your buildouts and be away.

(Much thanks to Tarek Ziade for helping me get windows and pypi to play nicely together via collective.dist.)

I start from the assumption that you have a functioning Zope/Plone instance and that you have correctly 'installed' the QuillsEnabled code.  The easiest way to do this is with buildout and including the Products.QuillsEnabled egg.

Now, go to your Plone instance, navigate to the portal_quickinstaller, and then install Products.QuillsEnabled.  This should lead to both Products.QuillsEnabled and quills.app appearing in your list of installed products/packages.

Next, create or navigate to a folder that you wish to act as a weblog.  Click on the 'Actions' drop-down menu and select 'Activate blog'.  You should now see that the folder has been 'decorated' with various blog-ish features.  Most notably, it should have a selection of new portlets such as: a 'tag cloug', 'recent entries', syndication, 'authors', and a 'weblog admin' portlet.

Great, you're basically there :).

To start actually blogging, just add a 'Page' (or 'News Item', if you prefer the features offered by that) type to the folder.  Once you're done editing your new Page-ish content, 'publish' it (in the standard Plone workflow sense) and then go back to the weblog-ish folder that you first created.

You should now see your newly-published post in the weblog view.  Some of the portlets should also have a little content now to reflect your new post - i.e. 'recent entries', 'authors', and 'weblog archive'.  If you added 'categories' (in the standard Plone keyword-ish way) to your post, then the tag cloud will also reflect this and provide you with links to listings of all posts in the weblog that have each of those 'tags'.  These are referred to as 'topics' in Quills.

People can actually subscribe to syndication feeds (i.e. RSS and Atom) for either the entire weblog or for each of the individual 'topics'.  'Neat', I hear you say ;-).

Actually, there is equivalent functionality for each individual 'author' who has posted to the weblog.  A listing of all posts made my each author is available, together with syndication feeds for them.  'Double neat', I hear you say ;-).

QuillsEnabled comes with a fair number of configuration options that are available via the 'Weblog Admin' portlet.  Click on 'Configure Blog' to access these.  You'll find you can adjust how much of each post gets shown in the weblog view (i.e. just the excerpt, if you wish).  You can configure which workflow states QuillsEnabled should consider as being 'published' and which to consider as being 'draft' - which makes it easy for you to use QuillsEnabled with your own custom workflow.  Other options are available but I'll let you find them yourself.

Finally, if you decide that you want to use some kind of remote blogging tool - like ScribeFire or Ecto - you can enable this as well.  Go back to portal_quickinstaller and install QuillsEnabledRemoteBlogging. Note, though, that you will have to have included this in your zope installation/buildout for it to be available.  It is an optional extra for QuillsEnabled.  The QI tool install process should also install MetaWeblogPASPlugin.  With that done, you should now have MetaWeblog API support for all your QuillsEnabled-enabled blogs.

I thought I'd update the list on some bugs I've just closed out:

• #151 - "Blog view should not use H3 for titles"
• #120 - "Viewing a weblog entry in the archive gives an incorrect breadcrumb path"
• #119 - "Add comment form doesn't respect weblog archive URLs"

I also made some (checked-in) progress on:

• #145 - "Templates should only use methods/attributes defined on relevant interfaces"

Finally, it would be great if someone with even *minimal* CSS understanding could take a look at:

• #153 - "Weblog Archive portlet renders incorrectly in IE6", where a fix has been suggested already, but just needs to be generalised to other portlets (I think).

As of now, the tracker has 10 open issues.

By my count, 3 (#79, #82, #113) of these are exceedingly low priorities or not really issues. 1 (#156) is a translation awaiting svn commit (the author has offered to do this). 2 are discussed above (#145 and #153). 1 should/may have been fixed already (#155). 1 has a fix in svn and is just awaiting confirmation to close (#149). 1 is in-progress by Jan Hackel (#142) but not a release blocker (IMO). And 1 on migration from 0.9 to 1.5 that seems old and I haven't looked at.

So, the tracker seems in good shape, as does the code base. New releases are imminent for both Products.Quills and Products.QuillsEnabled.

As part of the migration detailed in the previous post, I took the opportunity to write a small 'product' that makes it easy to integrate a StatCounter page counter into Plone sites. I had finally gotten sick of having to hack at main_template.pt in order to jam in the StatCounter code fragment. The result is Products.PloneStatCounter.

It provides an easy-to-use configlet for setting up the StatCounter project id and security code - as well as a couple of other slightly mysterious variables that appear to be required.

I made extensive use of Malthe Borch's tutorial on 'Adding configuration settings using Zope 3 schemas and formlib' and David Convent's tutorial on 'Customizing the viewlets in main_template'. As such, there is little of interest in a coding sense.

... Except for the fact that I found it necessary to avoid registering my viewlet in ZCML as I only wanted it to be used once the product itself had been installed in a portal_quickinstaller/GenericSetup sense. As such, I had to write the local viewlet registration code manually and have it run in my final GS import step.  philiKON was very helpful in pointing me in the right direction for how to do this, so thanks to him for saving me several hours of pain.

I spent this weekend upgrading the underlying Plone instance used to host my blog.  (This was largely because I wanted to get my personal site onto Plone 3 so I could use the NuPlone theme.)

In the process, I took the opportunity to migrate the blog to Quills 1.7.0b2.  Doing so required me first to release 1.7.0b2.  The only change included from beta 1 is that the migration now ensures that weblog entry workflow states are correctly handled.  My hope is that this will address issue 129 in the Quills tracker.

Eating my own dog food has revealed a couple of bugs.  First, portlets don't appear to work in the archive and topics areas of blogs.  From what I recall, this works in QuillsEnabled, so the fix shouldn't be difficult.  Second, when I tried to use ScribeFire (for remote blogging), adding a new post as a draft meant it was lost to ScribeFire (although there on the server).  Not sure whether this is a Quills or ScribeFire bug, though.

Looks like there'll need to be a 1.7.0b3 release...