Plox

Plox is a simple Perl blogging application, heavily inspired by Blosxom, but written from scratch. Blog entries are stored in the file system, no database is required to run Plox. To create, edit or delete an entry all you have to do is create, edit or delete a plain text file.

To get an impression of what a Plox featured blog looks like, see the news page of this site. The actual page style is completely customizable, Template Toolkit is used as template processing system. Basic example templates are included in the Plox distribution.

Note: Any news on Plox development will be posted on the news page, an Atom feed is also available.

Features:

• Blog entries (stories) are plain text files, folders act as categories, no database is required.
• Template Toolkit is used as template system.
• Use flavours to display the content in any format you want, eg. HTML, XHTML or as Atom feed.
• FastCGI version is available, offering much better performance than the CGI version.
• Plox can easily be extended by plugins.
• Display stories by day, by month or by year, or by category (or combine these filter criteria).
• No comment spam, since comments are not supported at the moment. (Yes, it's a feature! ☺)
• Plox is free and open source software.

Installation

Installation instructions can be found in the README file included in the archive. If you have any questions, please send a mail to plox@ntworks.net.

Documentation

There is currently no end user documentation of Plox available, basic usage instructions can be found in the README file. Documentation for developers is included in the Perl files in POD format, use the perldoc command to display it.

Requirements

The minimum requirements are:

• Un*x like operating system, eg. Linux, *BSD - Windows is not supported at the moment
• Perl
• Template Toolkit
• CGI module
• a webserver with CGI support

Additionally, if you want to use the FastCGI version of Plox (recommended):

• CGI::Fast module
• a webserver with FastCGI support

Apache's mod_rewrite (or similar when using another server) is recommended, but not required.

Note that some plugins may require additional modules or even external programs to be available, check the documentation of the plugins for details.

Plugins

Most of the functionality of Plox is provided by plugins, with the Plox core plugin doing most of the work. Additional plugins can by used to add or modify the data gathered by the core plugin, making it easy to extend Plox with every feature you need. The following plugins are currently included in the Plox distribution:

• Atom
  - provides some data required for the Atom feed
• BetterTitle
  - generates a title for the requested page
• Gallery
  - generate image galleries — experimental!
• MoreEntries
  - provides a next/previous page functionality
• NotFound
  - send 404 error pages instead of empty pages
• Paragraphs
  - automatically insert <p> tags in the stories
• ProcessTime
  - measures the time it takes to generate a page
• SeyMore
  - split a story and show only the first part on index pages
• Today
  - provides some date related information
• XhtmlMime
  - send XHTML content type if the client prefers it

Bugs

• documentation could be improved ☺
• Submit a new bug report

Download

Download plox-0.1.2.tar.gz (version 0.1.2, 2009/07/07, 42 kB)

License

Copyright © 2009 Stefan Göbel

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Page content licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (deutsche Version).