Terry's Blog Engine Documentation

Contents

• Introduction
• Economy of implementation
  • A Unified Context Layer
  • A Unified Database Layer
  • A Unified Template Layer

• Efficient performance on a shared hosting environment
  • Source processing
  • My Templating engine
  • HTML caching
  • HTML and CSS optimisation

• Authoring experience
  • Using OpenOffice.org Writer
  • Using TinyMCE

• Classes

• functions.php

Introduction

I decided to implement my own blog in 2006 and in this early article I discussed why I chose the Eggblog blog engine. However, I was disatisfied with some of the Eggblog features and I disliked the Eggblog V4 implementation, so I decided to do was a total rewrite of the blog engine as a programming project. This project of implementing my "Version 2" engine became the theme of many blog articles. However during its first year's use I realised that there were many aspects of the architecture that in hindsight I would have done differently, so I have now developed this Version 3 as a full refactoring with various enhancements to clear off this bucketlist.

One item on this bucketlist was that I was unhappy with the standard of documentation in my engine (even though it was better than that of the FLOSS packages that I've worked with). I have used Doxygen on previous projects, so I decided to adopt it for this PHP-based project. I have been extremely satisfied and this documentation set is the Doxygen O/P. However I also had some other key goals for Version 3:

• Economy of implementation. I hate long-winded coding styles. I have had a number of debates with the phpBB designers about why phpBB seems to have adopted a style that takes ~100 lines to implement a function that could be done in ~10 lines – an approach that seems to regard verbosity as equivalent to clarity. My belief is that the implementation effort is directly proportional to the length of the code and ditto the error rates. Putting thought into how you can ensure that the implementation is crisp, clean and orthogonal before you code pays huge through-life dividends. My blog engine (excluding comments) is under 4K lines long, yet it provides comparable functionality to Wordpress, but with a materially better runtime performance in a Webfusion environment.

• Efficient performance on a shared hosting environment. I have worked with and have customised large open-source PHP applications such as phpBB, Mediawiki and Wordpress, and my experience is that they perform poorly on a shared hosting environment. For example, in a LAMP environment they all require the use of mod_php and a PHP Opcode accelerator such as APC to get acceptable user response; and these modules just aren't available on a typical shared service. There is no reason for this other than laziness on the part of the developers.

• Authoring experience. Many blogs have a limited editing framwork which is well suited to creating simple diary-style posts. However I wanted to use my blog as a vehicle for writing technical articles. So I have fully integrated the powerful OpenOpenOffice.org Writer into the blog as a seemless WYSIWYG authoring tool. I also implement a full TinyMCE rich-text editing interface for end-users to add comments and as an alternative authoring tool for use 'on the road'.

The corresponding sections referenced in the above list give a general overview and discussion on this aspect of the design, with the meat of the code-specific documentation covered in the Class List