Quills

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...

QuillsEnabled

The 1.7.0b1 code is the first actual release of the QuillsEnabled codebase.  The version number reflects the progress of development in the rest of the Quills project.

It removes the need for custom content types and instead makes it possible to mark standard Plone folders as blogs and then treats standard Plone 'Page' objects as entries.  Those objects are adapted to specific blog-ish interfaces under the hood.  Advantages of this over just using those standard objects on their own are:

• Blog-ish URLs of the [weblog]/2008/06/31/entry-id form.
• The ability to use a MetaWeblog remote blogging client to post new entries.
• A selection of blog-ish portlets - including by-month archives, a tag cloud, author listing, recent comments, recent posts, etc.
• Powerful syndication features - including syndication feeds on a per-topic basis.

Quills

The 1.7.0b1 release provides incremental changes over the existing 1.6 series.  A detailed change log will probably be forthcoming when we get to 1.7.0 (final)... or when someone writes it :).

Giving Them a Try

Both products are released as eggs and are available on PyPI.  Giving the code a try should be as easy as add "Products.Quills" (or "Products.QuillsEnabled") to the "eggs" listing in your buildout.cfg.  (Svn tags of all packages have also been made, but there seems little need to get involved in that.)

Using the MetaWeblog remote blogging facility is optional.  Add the "Products.QuillsRemoteBlogging" (or "Products.QuillsEnabledRemoteBlogging") egg to enable this feature.

These releases should work on both Plone 3.0.x and 3.1.x.

Bug reports and feedback most welcome via the issue tracker.