Where do a weblog’s entries live, when they’re not being poured into HTML templates? Movable Type lets you keep weblog entries in DBM files, MySQL or some other database; Radio keeps them in it’s own internal database; PHP -based blogging tools are naturally fixated on MySQL
I can use PHP on my server and I can use CGIs, but the man is leery of users mucking about in his MySQL database (and with good reason and after a few mishaps with DBM module incompatibilities, I’d really prefer to store my blog’s data in text files.
The most popular file-system-based weblogging tool I know is Blosxom , which runs as a CGI and renders a bunch of text files as a bunch of blog entries, sorted by date (using the file system’s date of modification) or by category (based on directories). It can also output RSS flavours, statically render the HTML (like Movable Type and Radio do), etc. It’s a cool, simple script that has been ported to both Python and PHP and while it’s been called ugly I actually think that it demonstrates very nicely the expressiveness of Perl and the Unix philosophy.
The main drawback I saw to it was the need to muck about with FTP to upload entries, as opposed to the simplicity of using a web based form (oh, and the fragility of depending on the file’s modification date for ordering the entries). And the reason I’m rambling about this is that I ran across something called PHPetal.
PHPetal is a PHP script for adding entries through a web-based form; Looking around, I also found a blosxom plug-in that does something similar.
And if I ever become serious about doing this, here’s
Mt2blosxom, a conversion script for moving Movable Type entires over to Blosxom.