Bloo Development Blog

Bloo version 1.32 released

Bill — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:25:10 +0000

Bloo version 1.32 has been released. You can download it here.

Below are the significant features and bug fixes in this release:

Added the BlooStats package, which keeps statistical counts on posts and thus aids in the performance of the blog
Fixed a problem with the dates on draft posts, which were not advancing to the current date when the post was made public
Was unable to delete comments on blogs that had Bloo Wiki enabled. This has been fixed
Notification settings for new comments/new posts for a sub-blog were being sent to users of the main blog as well. Fixed this
Fixed a none-too-friendly error message when bloo.config.php is missing.
For users of Bloo version 1.30, there is now a quick upgrade option.

More releases coming soon!

Bloo version 1.32 now being tested

Bill — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:57:33 +0000

Bloo version 1.31 (release candidate for version 1.32) is being rolled out to several blogs for testing. If all goes well, version 1.32 should be available to the public in a few days.

More info coming soon . . .

Bloo version 1.30 released

Bill — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:48:25 +0000

Bloo version 1.30 has been released. You can download it here.

Below are the significant features and bug fixes in this release:

Posters can now alter the date and time on a post
BlooNews is now available. BlooNews allows for blogs to subscribe to Bloo news from the Bloo Development blog (devblog.outofthebloo.com). This extension also allows a blog to become a news publisher
Added an RSS feed for Post Categories
Community blogs can now be set as public/private. Only public blogs will be displayed on the front page of a community blog.
Added profile settings to provide for email notification to a user if a new post and/or comment is created on the blog. If you want to be notified anytime another poster creates a post on your blog, or anytime someone comments on a post written by another poster, turn these settings on in your profile (obviously, this mainly applies to group blogs)
Fixed a problem with decomposing ampersand entities in posts and pages.
There was a problem logging in; if the server didn't have a valid domain name it wasn't saving the cookie. There were also problems related to logging out that have been fixed. Some of these problems were related to how the unique "blog signature" was being created. This root cause has been fixed.
Foxed a problem with the RSS feed, which often did not work in bloglines.
Fixed slashes/magic quote processing. Improper handling was causing slashes to appear in notification emails, for instance.
The guest account was logging in to no specified administrative panel. Now is taken to the My Profile panel
Fixed a problem that was discovered in the upgrade program when upgrading from a 1.10 blog.
Generalized the RSS Collector, to allow it to be used for multiple types of RSS feeds
Added the PhooCheckBox class to the Phoo Phramework
Parameters can now be passed to a SnapOn

Work will soon commence on the next release of Bloo.

Happy New Year!

Bloo version 1.30 coming soon

Bill — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 04:42:51 +0000

The next version of Bloo is now being tested on some key blogs and will be released for general consumption sometime in the next week or two.

More information coming. The Bloo New Year's Resolution is to have more frequent releases!

Just upgraded the development blog to Bloo version 1.25

Bill — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:38:31 +0000

Bloo version 1.25 has not been released for public consumption yet, but the development blog has been upgraded to it so that it can start doling out Bloo News, using the new Bloo News extension. This is the first news post.

Once this version is fully vetted and rolled out, anyone who upgrades to it will have a much more direct way of being notified of new Bloo releases and other Bloo doings.

There are some new themes coming soon as well.

Login problems?

Bill — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:49:13 +0000

If you're running Bloo version 1.20 through 1.22, you might, through luck of the draw, be having login problems. This is due to a cookie-unfriendly character (a percent sign) that might be generated as part of your blog's unique signature.

The solution for this is here.

This will be fixed in the next release.

Bloo version 1.22 released

Bill — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:16:35 +0000

Today Bloo version 1.22 was released. You can download it here. This release is primarily a bug-fix release, with specific attention toward fixing theme problems that manifest in earlier versions of IE.

Bugs Fixed

Fixed the Pre Render event, which was not working on menu items. Fixed
In IE, when logged into a community blog, the front page of the blog did not acknowledge the login. This has been fixed.
Fixed problems with the base three column theme - had a fat-fingered style
Fixed some themes that were not rendering in earlier versions of IE. Included in this were the Bloo Clouds theme, Red Train, Camera, Jill, Field of Dreams and Pure. These themes can be found at the Bloo Themes site.
Bloogroll Posts description was incorrect. It needed to reference the RSS Collector which was established in version 1.20. This is fixed.

Some New Themes

Bill — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:03:50 +0000

Three new themes have been deployed to the Bloo Themes site and can be downloaded from there. More are coming - the hope is to start releasing more themes and extension SnapOns in the near future.

Here are the themes.

Flower Power, based on the Wordpress theme by Mark Hoodia.

Japan Style, based on the Wordpress Theme by Good Design Web

Old Type - an original Bloo theme.

In addition, some problems that have been discovered when browsing with IE 6 have been fixed in the following themes:

Field of Dreams

Red Train

There are other themes, some in the core product, that don't render correctly in IE 6 (bleaugh on that browser). These will be fixed in the next version of Bloo, coming soon!

Login bug on Bloo Community

Bill — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:34:51 +0000

To any Bloo Community users who use Internet Explorer: a bug was discovered which causes the system to not "remember" that you are logged in when you view your main blog page. This is being fixed and a new release will be out, hopefully, soon.

Bloo version 1.20 Released!

Bill — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:07:03 +0000

Bloo version 1.20 is released! You can download it here.

In many ways, Bloo 1.20 will look a whole lot like Bloo 1.10. But it contains some pretty significant feature additions, and represents a real firming up of the underlying Bloo architecture as it's always been envisioned (but not quite implemented, until now):

Below are the major features and bug-fixes included in this release:

Bloo Community - this one is pretty huge. Bloo Community is an extension SnapOn included in the core release that allows you to, on the fly, create sub-blogs off your main blog. Each sub-blog is a full-blow Bloo release, but entirely segregated from the content on your main blog. You can even open up things so that guests can request a sub-blog under your main blog (you have full control over accepting or rejecting that request, and also you can suspend or delete sub-blogs that don't behave). You can read more about Bloo Community on the Bloo Wiki, here.
RSS caching and collection is now centralized and part of the core release. You can read more about this on the Bloo Wiki here
Added About Me link to the Sidebar
Provides for version checking on snapOns
Cleaner error messages
Created new Wrapper styles for themes - this gives more flexibility on how themes behave. You can read about the changes to themes in 1.20 on the Bloo Wiki, here (and if you've created your own theme in Bloo, you really need to read that to help convert your theme)
Removed some old core themes. So there are less themes delivered with Bloo, but the ones that were removed were pretty cr@ptastic anyway. You can find more themes for Bloo on the Bloo Themes Site.
Add more base themes for sidebar right, sidebar left, and three column. All Bloo themes at this point cascade from one of these three.
Added the BlooWiki SnapOn to the release. Using this extension SnapOn, you can now easily turn your blog into a WIKI (our own Bloo WIKI is built off of this).
Fixed a problem with localhost login (for people testing Bloo locally)
Fixed a problem with trackback and comments links when title permalinks are enabled.
Improved the RSS Feed
Fixed a problem with the FavoritePosts extension SnapOn that made it not work if permalinks not set to title
Fixed a problem with Theme Preview - Stop Preview wasn't working

Now that 1.20 is out, a lot more attention is going to be paid to creating new Themes and extension SnapOns.

Update on Bloo version 1.20

Bill — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:34:28 +0000

Although originally scheduled for November, obviously 1.20 was not released at that time ;-) - some features were added, and a lot of work has gone into just getting it as ready as possible for public consumption. One big change was in how themes are handled; some style changes were made to the base themes to make them more flexible, and this delayed things a bit.

It's the stretch run now. The pre-release versions are being tested on several different sites, and final bugs and features are being resolved and coded. In addtion, work is ramping up on Bloo Community (more on that soon).

Thanks for your patience!

Problem found with PHP version 5.2.8

Bill — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:31:44 +0000

The newest version of PHP (version 5.2.8) has either a bug or a "feature" in how it reads XML that renders bloo blogs unreadable.

The good news is that this is fixable. Version 1.20 of Bloo should fix this problem for good, by changing the way we're laying down a lot of the XML that Bloo needs to produce all visual elements. 1.20 is coming out soon, so hopefully no one will experience any downtime. If necessary, a patch will be delivered.

If you experience unexplained, garbled output in your Bloo blog, contact your webhost to see if your server was upgraded to PHP 5.2.8. And please let us know here, so a patch can be delivered to you.

Bloo version 1.20 coming soon

Bill — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:15:13 +0000

. . . hopefully in November.

Version 1.20 introduces some significant structural changes, although the blog will, for the most part, behave as before.

The biggest new feature in version 1.20 will be Bloo Community, which will allow Bloo bloggers to open up their blog space for the registration of sub-blogs. It's kind of like setting up your own private MySpace (or Idaho, or whatever) community. The main Bloo site (http://outofthebloo.com) will be opening up for community blog registrations soon, meaning you can become a Bloo blogger without having to download and install the code in your own webspace. Lots more coming on this.

Following 1.20, a lot more attention will be paid to the development of themes and extension SnapOns.

Patch 02 for Bloo version 1.10 released

Bill — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:11:01 +0000

There is a patch for Bloo version 1.10 that fixes a problem in the post category administration that is preventing the creation or editing of categories. When these operations are attempted, the web-page just times out.

You can download the patch here.

Once downloaded, do the following:

Upload the bloo.install.command.overlays.xml file to your blog's "install" directory
Upload the post.command.overlays.xml file to your blog's "core" subdirectory:
Once that's done, go to your administrative panel,
a. select Lists and Settings
b. select Post categories
c. Click the "edit" link next to the General category
d. Edit it (if desired - but if not, still go through this process) and press Save

Patch 01 for Bloo version 1.10 released

Bill — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:48:26 +0000

There is a patch for Bloo version 1.10 that is necessary if you are getting nasty errors when upgrading from Bloo version 1.00 to 1.10. Basically, the patch fixes a problem that occurs for webhosts that do not have gpc magic quotes turned on by default.

You'll know you have the error if you get something that looks like this when you run the upgrade program:

SQL Error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that
corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
''Page.sidebar'' at line 6:select o.overlay_id ,o.syntax from vl_overlay
o where o.syntax like '%Post.form.search%' and deleted_flag = 'N' and
o.name = 'Page.sidebar'

Installing the patch and re-running the upgrade will fix the problem. The patch is relatively small - just two files.

You can download the patch here.

Two new themes - Butterfly and Elegant

Bill — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:13:51 +0000

Two new themes have been uploaded to the Themes blog and are available for downloading and use on your Bloo blog. They are:

Butterfly (based on the Expression Engine theme by Thomas Arie Setiawan).

Elegant (based on the Elegant 2.0 WordPress theme by ShinRa)

New Themes

Bill — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:50:10 +0000

Some new themes have been uploaded to the Themes blog and are available for downloading and use on your Bloo blog. They are:

Daleri Dark (based on the Wordpress theme by Andreas Viklund).

Pure (based on the WordPress theme by Celestial Star)

Note: Pure requires Bloo version 1.10 to function properly. If you're not already on that version, you can upgrade to it by following the instructions here.

Field of Dreams (based on the Field of Dreams WordPress theme by Nathan Metzger)

Note: Field of Dreams requires Bloo version 1.10 to function properly. If you're not already on that version, you can upgrade to it by following the instructions here.

Refreshing (based on the Refreshing WordPress theme by Kate of rock-kitty.net)

More themes are coming soon . . .

Bloo version 1.10 Released!

Bill — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:03:56 +0000

Bloo version 1.10 is (finally) released! It includes some nice improvements over 1.00. You can download it here.

Below are the main features and fixes included in this release

New and improved install and upgrade programs
Title-based permalinks are now available. In other words, instead of your post permalink appearing as http://myblog/post_id=1, your permalink can look like http://myblog/posts/out-of-the-bloo-a-blog
Beefed up security layers to protect against hacks.
Searches now work for static pages as well as posts
Improved the emails sent on comments and trackbacks
Linefeed to BR tag replacements for posts and pages are now smarter. They won't add BR tags within TABLE, OL or UL tags
General improvements in sidebar styles and organization
Fixed a problem with the published date in the Comments RSS feed
Fixed a problem with the Recent Comments link, which was preventing it from working
Fixed a problem with the upgrade/install Ping that caused some blogs to hang on install

Click here for the detailed release notes.

Problem discovered on theme create

Bill — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:55:15 +0000

For those of you on version 1.00 that have installed Patch 2, please avoid creating new themes within the system (i.e, don't create table-based themes). A problem has been discovered that will cause the blog not to initialize if you create a new theme.

This has been fixed and the fix will be in the next release of the software (1.1) coming soon. In the meantime, if you run into a problem after creating an on-the-fly theme within Bloo, you can get back up and running by manually deleting the new theme from the snap_on table.

If you need help, leave a message here.

Again, this only affects you if you're on Bloo version 1.00 patch 2.

Bloo 1.00 Security Patch released

Bill — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:46:28 +0000

Bloo version 1.00 Patch 2 has been released to resolve some known security holes in Bloo. If you are a Bloo version 1.00 user, this patch is highly recommended (note: it is only for version 1.00). You can download the patch, in either zip or tgz format, here. Just click on bloo.v.1.00.patch02.zip or bloo.v.1.00.patch02.tgz.

(for more information on the already-released patch01, click here)

In other news, work on Bloo version 1.1 is movin' right along. Expect the new version to be released soon!