OK, these notes are a bit late. But what the hay.

Here is a summary of the new features and other whatnot I built into the latest version of Bloo. Altogether there were 41 discrete changes made, all worked on in timeslices measured in minutes, or, as I like to put it: “in my copious free time”):

Major changes:

1. Lots and lots (and lots!) of internal reorganization, optimization, bug-fixing, etc.

2. Rewrote the Lists package. So much on a blog is composed of Lists – the quotes, blogroll, system settings, etc are all stored in Lists. My first implementation of Lists was too clever by half (that’s my way of saying it stunk), so I re-wrote that puppy!

3. Now the comment author’s name is a link to their url if they supplied one.

4. Now all the overlays can be loaded by files. Contain your excitement everyone! Heh – actually, I know no one cares but this is huge for the way Bloo works and was another step in my evolving understanding of how I want to do Overlays. One of the more notable features of the planned public domain release (if I can get it done in time!) will be the ability to pretty much change everything about the way your blog appears, on the fly, while still being able to get back to what you had before if you screw up.

5. The Menus in the administration part of the blog (the part you never see 🙂 are now displayed based on your security role.

6. Came up with the concept of Event handlers for a SnapOn. Strap on your Nerdvana helmet, everyone, because this one is huge! The point of it is to allow the developer to enhance SnapOns without the SnapOn’s knowledge, and without recoding it. Now you just attach events to it. For instance, the Gravatar enhancement is an onDisplay event attached to the CommentsDisplay SnapOn – whenever you display a comment it fires this event ot modify the comment display so that the author’s gravatar (if one exists) is shown. I actually turned this off last week (my Gravatar bugged me plus the way I formatted the comments looked like poo) but I may turn it back on if my new Gravatar is now available. Will check after I finish this post. These event handlers, by the way, can be turned on and off on the fly.

7. Now when a draft post is saved as public, the date of the post changes to the current date. This is done via an onSave event handler.

8.I implemented an easy way to do RI constraint checking. If you don’t know what this is, trust me, it’s cool.

9. Created the aforementioned Gravatar onDisplay event handler.

OK, this doesn’t look like much, I know – but there was a lot of great setup for the future done in this release. Some of these enhancements were major re-writes, but it was worth it. More is coming.

I’m currently doing a full code review, and gearing up for the next release. The public domain release is scheduled for February 28-March 2, so I’m getting stoked.

And then I’ll wait for people to start using and extending Bloo. And wait, and wait, and . . . well, we’ll see!

Watch me for the changes . . .