One important, foundational philosophy in the development of Bloo is the desire to avoid having to create certain areas where new functionality can be "plugged in". Instead, Bloo is built of discreet components called SnapOns. Everything you see is generated by a SnapOn. There aren't any plug-ins, doggonit! It's all SnapOns. The only thing that makes an Extension SnapOn different is that it is located in the extensions subdirectory, rather than the snapons subdirectory, and thus is loaded conditionally (as described below).
In how they are coded and built, extension SnapOns are no different than the Bloo Core SnapOns. They just live in a different directory and, instead of being loaded as needed without question, as the core SnapOns are, extension SnapOns have to be enabled by the administrator. this is done in the SnapOns administration menu, which Bloo Administrators can see.
There are a number of extension SnapOns that come with the bloo distribution when you download the code (see Downloading Bloo). Listed below are the extension SnapOns available in the core Bloo download as of Bloo version 1.00, release candidate 1.
General Extension SnapOns
| Bloo Quote | Manages a list of quotes that can be displayed on either a daily rotation or a "quote of the moment" rotation. The Jack Handy quotes on the Bloo Development Blog are a good example of what a BlooQuote SnapOn generates. |
| Previous Posts | Displays links to the 10 most recent previous to the most recent post. Generally you want to put this in the Sidebar. |
| Favorite Posts | Display links to a number of posts that you consider your favorites |
| Popular Posts | Displays links to the 10 posts that have received the most comments. |
| Reading List | Manages a list of books that can be displayed in a "What I'm Reading" list, generally in the sidebar. |
| Smilies | Well, if you're into this sort of thing, the Smilies SnapOn will convert emoticons such as :-), :lol:, etc, into little graphical smilies. New smilies can be added by the administrator. |
Bible SnapOns
| ESV Daily Passage | Displays a daily BIble passage from the ESV Bible site. |
| Scripturizer | This SnapOn enables a javascript that will convert any scriptural reference (such as John 3:16) into a link to the ESV Bible site |
Community
| Bloo Community | Want to create sub-blogs off your blog? Create a community where friends can have blogs without having to know how to upload code, configure databases, etc? Want to be your own private MySpace? Then this is the SnapOn for you. |
Feed Readers
| Bloogroll Posts | Collects and displays recent posts from the RSS feeds of the sites in your Bloogroll. This generally works best if you can enable a cron job on your webhost to do the collection in the background. A good example of a site that does this is Out of the Bloo (see the "View Bloogroll Posts" link in the sidebar). |
| Bloo News | Receive regular news updates in your administrative panel from Bloo News sites, such as the Bloo Development blog. |
Spamicide
Do you hate spam and those who make a living mucking up the internet with it? Me too . . . (well, I don't hate the people, but their actions sure bug me).
| CT Code | This is the default spam protection for Bloo. It creates hard to crack codes in comment or trackback submissions that are hard to spoof by the spammers. This spam filter works behind the scenes and doesn't impact legitimate commenters/trackbackers at all. |
| Lag Time Spam Checker | This allows you to set a time limit on posts - any comments or trackbacks coming down the pike on an older post (a common mark of spammers) gets thrown immediately into Comment/Trackback Moderation. |
| Simple Human Check | A favorite. This is a simple SnapOn that just asks a random question of commenters that, in general, only a human can answer. The questions are made up by you. Examples of a Simple Human Check question might be "What is the third word in this sentence?" or "What color is the sky on a clear day?". You can set multiple correct answers. This SnapOn is pretty effective against comment spam, although it does require commenters to answer a question each time the comment. |
| Remote Blacklist | This SnapOn checks any comment or trackback against some well-known remote black list servers to see if the IP generating the comment/trackback has been flagged as a spammer. Generally fairly effective, but also results in false positives at time |
Spell Checkers
| Bloo Comment Spell Checker | This SnapOn inserts a little spell-checker module in the Comments form. The spellchecker is the GoogieSpell spell checker, which contains an interface to Google Spell. |
| Bloo Post Spell Checker | Same thing, except for posts. |
Theme
| Theme Selector | Creates a drop down that you can put in your sidebar if you want to give your visitors the option to select their own theme for your blog |
Writing
| Rich Text Post Editor | allows you to create and edit your posts using the TinyMCE rich text editor, rather than coding the HTML yourself. Note: this editor also includes a spell checker and a feature that checks to see if you've made changes before navigating away from the screen. So certain other SnapOns (such as the Bloo Comment and Post Spell Checkers and the Post/Comment Changes Protector) aren't necessary. And, of course, the QuickTags SnapOns aren't needed |
| Rich Text Comment Editor | same as the Rich Text Post Editor, except for Comments. |
| Post Quick Tags | if you aren't using the Rich Text editor, this SnapOn comes in handy to help you insert HTML tags in your post. |
| Comment Quick Tags | same as the Post Quick Tags, except for Comments. |
| Post Changes Protector | If you aren't using the Rich Text editor, this SnapOn protects you from navigating away from a post you were editing, thus losing all your changes (ever had that happen? It's a drag . . .) |
| Comment Changes Protector | same as the Post Changes Protector, except for Comments. |