Jul 13, 2007, 11:56 AM -04:00

Blosxom Warts

At the moment I'm using blosxom to generate this blog. I'm using blosxom for the following reasons:

  • the HTML is completely under my control.

  • there is no database or PHP required.

  • the codebase is tiny, which means I have a better chance of fixing whatever problems crop up and also of integrating it into my site.

So far, it seems to work okay. My blog looks more or less the way I want it to. More specifically, it looks like it's a seamless part of my web site, which is exactly the effect I was after.

That being said, I'm finding that blosxom has a few warts:

  • blosxom does not seem to be actively maintained. The original author has, from what I can tell, abandoned it, and the plugins are all pretty creaky. This is more of an annoyance than a showstopper since, as mentioned, the codebase is small, so it's usually not difficult to understand what's going on. Also, I am at least somewhat familiar with perl, to the point where I can generally fix whatever problem is cropping up, so long as the problem is with the usage of the program rather than some fundamental, application-level bug in the code (i.e. I would probably be able to fix an incorrect config item in the code, but I wouldn't be able to readily fix a bug in RSS generation without doing serious research into the RSS format).

  • blosxom's configuration is built into the script. You need to change the script to change the configuration. Weird.

  • blosxom uses its own (very simplistic) interpolation and templating system. I'm sure there are some who would consider this an advantage, but I'm not one of them. I'm a fan of simplicity, but this is a little too simple. For example, you can only interpolate scalar variables into the templates. This necessitates certain contortions when you want to do anything more complicated (see my note below on separation of content and presentation).

  • I use the Template Toolkit (TT) to generate the pages on my site, and I like it, but more than that, I make heavy use of the WRAPPER directive to centralize the "structure" of my webpages. I'd like to use TT in this fashion to template my blog, but blosxom's plugin architecture makes it difficult to do this.

  • the "seamlessness" between my blog and the rest of my site is pure illusion. As mentioned, I use a centralized template to hold the "structure" of my web pages. This is at odds with the way blosxom does things; it spits out a "head" chunk, followed by several "story" chunks, followed by a "footer" chunk. There's no real linkage between the different chunks except through the driver program. I got around this by writing a special plugin to dynamically "break down" my templates into something that blosxom could cope with, but this is a hack, at best.

  • the line between content and presentation is blurred. I use a plugin, for example, to generate the archive tree on my blog. This plugin, like some nightmarish CGI program from the mid 90's, programatically spits out fully formed HTML markup from perl code, to be appended to blosxom's output via template variables. What's the point of having an (admittedly simplistic) templating system if you just bypass it completely? I know the answer, more or less: blosxom's templating system is too simplistic to cope with structured data. The approach taken to work around this limitation works, certainly, but it's an assault on my sense of aesthetics.

On the one hand, these seem to be fundamental problems with blosxom. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of alternatives out there, considering my design goals. And even though I've vented considerably about blosxom's inadequacies, I do like the clean, lean driver program that it offers. I like the fact that most of the functionality in blosxom is delivered via plugins, if not necessarily how those plugins are written. And I do like the fact that there exists a considerable wealth of plugins for blosxom, even if most of those are unmaintained.

One project I'm keeping track of is Bryar. This is a blosxom "inspired" project and it aims to be a more modernized version of the software. It uses the Template Toolkit for templating purposes (awesome!) and it corrects what I see as a major flaw in blosxom's design, namely the incorporation of configuration items in the blosxom script itself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how one goes about writing plugins for this thing. It doesn't seem to be set up to do it in a very straightforward manner.

For all its warts, there is very little you can't do with blosxom, given the time and inclination. I'm not yet convinced of that when it comes to Bryar. I guess we'll find out.