So whatever happened to completely rewriting GL in the full OO paradigm with minimal DB calls, etc? Oh, I guess I mean 2.0? Oh yeah, it died...

Damn, I shouldn't have gone to college...then I could have worked on GL instead.

In the past month or two I have installed or compared just about every piece of software that bills itself as a content manager, portal, or weblog, searching for a site manager that would work for both the classes I teach at Cal State Nortridge and for a couple of sites with politically sensitive material that might come under hacker attack. I essentially have been living on freshmeat and sourceforge, with frequent side trips to hotscripts and Zend. Some reactions:

There are surprisingly only two systems with good flood control (the ability to restrict the frequency of posts by a malevolent user), Geeklog and Drupal. Drupal unfortunately has a downright Byzantine system for community voting on both items and comments. If you don't like it you need to rip out code in massive hunks. However, the Drupal engine has been stripped down and incorporated into the latest version of HPE, the software that runs NewsIsFree, so it bears watching.

Of phpNuke and its forks, the parent program has a large following, lots of plugins, an irascible project owner, and the code is pretty bad spaghetti. MyPhpNuke has a development community beset by bickering and is probably worth avoiding. PostNuke is progressing nicely, but suffers from a kind of kitchen sink approach. Of all the forks, the one I like the most is phpWebSite, largely because it's being developed in an academic setting (Appalachian State) and thus seems to be a more orderly project, and because its releases are becoming increasingly modular. But I'll probably be switching from phpWS to Geeklog for the security features.

If you don't mind Perl, Scoop is the most robust and active open source project.

Finally, if your needs are more content management driven and if you've got root access and/or JSP servlet support, check out EZPublish, Typo3, and if you're really brave, Knight-Ridder's CoFax content management system. But you really need to have your own server rather than a virtual host.

This is already too long a post, but I'd be happy to answer any further comparison questions.

After a bit of playing I sort of reached the same conclusion. I am hesitating now between PhpWebSite, PostNuke and GeekLog. I'd add phpweblog to the list of nice systems it you don't want a good user/admin system. Though 0.5.3 adds simple user levels.

What I found interesting is that most systems now try to be modular at the "API" level, I mean it's become easier to add modules ("modularity" in the sense of code being nicely rewritten is another issue). Almost every system I looked at just came out with some major architectural improvements. That's good. What's bad is that between all the things announced for "any time soon" and the preasure of having something now I feel a bit stressed :)

Concerning Geeklog: I can see: Better language support (e.g. users can select their UI language. Full multiple language support would be even better (support for stories in different languages), but difficult. Also, I tried to get Geeklog 1.3 from CVS, but was permission denied.

- Daniel

PS: I have a simple webpage with some pointers.

Thanks,

-- Dries

Mail from via central function that could be hacked or alternativly (and better) let people choose between mail/sendmail and some SMTP library that you provide :)

This is why: Under Unixes PhP compiles with sendmail support. Now sendmail does not work in some places. E.g. I have an address like x@host.domain.ch. Host.domain.ch is a real machine and sendmail instead of sending it to the Mail exchange (MX) sends it to a physical machine which just trashes the mail. Don't really understand all this (and in theory sendmail might be configured maybe, but in a sendmail hating environment nobody will help me with this). In any casee, I know that I am not the only one who has to use a smtp class. E.g. in some LANs, sendmail is not even allowed.

If you are interested there are several packages: http://phpclasses.upperdesign.com/browse.html/package/14
http://www.phpguru.org/scripts/10/
http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/
Doing it properly is some work I guess, but at least calling a central "mymail" and preferable with more arguments than just the 4 mail() ones would ease adaptation work. NONE of the portals I have looked at, have this feature. Would be another argument in favor of GL :).

Bad and lazy programmers like me just do something like this and global-replace calls to mail() .... (and loose some information):

require ("/web/lib/php/smtp-mail/smtp.class");

function my_mail($mailto, $subject, $message, $headers) {
// fix arguments
$mailtolist[]=$mailto;
$from="webrobot@x.y.ch";
// headers come in string :( )
$headers=split("n",$headers);
$headers[]="Subject: ".$subject."n";
// debugging
foreach ($headers as $el ) {
echo "EL=$el";
};
// send it
$mailer = new smtp_class();
$mailer->SendMessage($from,$mailtolist,$headers,$message);
}

Yes, the category implementation for everything in GL suxs. I do plan to fix this annoying problem in GL 1.3.1. I will implement it in the DB so that plugins can take advantage of the category system without having to add their own category table. --Tony

What's up with the scoop link? phpnuke.org? The correct link for scoop is http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/.

--panner

I run GeekLog on Falkware.com. The site started out small like any site, but now we're growing fast. The interesting thing is that GeekLog is holding up good so far. Logging over 500,000 pageviews last month there's very little to complain about. Considering the amount of attacks we get on the site, it has yet to be compromised.

I can point out that some users are rather upset about the password system. Someone wanting to cause grief only needs to know the persons username to actually get a password reset and a new one randomly generated.

I think this are could use some re-thinking. A statement about implementing verification pages on actions like delete was was also made, but I've yet to see those.

I'm excited about the access and plugin system in 1.3. I think Tony, Mark and the guys are doing a tremendous job on making GeekLog better, and Falkware.com will continue to grow in the veil of GeekLog.

I do think user support could be perfected, which has little to do with actual software.

I can once more ask for custom timezone setup, a brand new link system (or use something sufficient) and that common sense be used on msg board integration. In other words... make it assimilate with the system. Use the boxes on the sides to display latest posts and so on...

Many ways to go...Lots to think about...

Further I'd like to THANK mark limburg for setting up this new site. Once the logo is reworked it's a great first impression!

1. anon user requests new password on account name
2. email is sent to account owner
3. email contains link to script on site, which uses an emailed variable of md5(username.password_hash) variable
4. if emailed variable matches md5MD5(username.password_hash), then allow person to enter a new md5'ed password