Geeklog

The comment plugin API for previous versions of Geeklog has been bothering me for a long time. There were some fundamental problems that prevented plugin authors from exercising full control over their comments. To correct these deficiencies and to hopefully make development of plugins using comments simpler, we've revamped the comment API making it more powerful and at the same time easier to use.

Below is a description of the new plugin comment engine and how to use it in the development of Geeklog plugins. Those unfamiliar with plugin development in Geeklog may first want to read Geeklog's Plugin Development Guide.

Geeklog 1.4 introduces a new feature “Remote Authentication”. The motivation behind this core feature is simple: Users do not want to sign up at every site they visit to post a comment, and site administrators do not want to allow anonymous comments due to spam and other factors. Remote Authentication solves this problem by allowing people to login to your Geeklog site with their login credentials for another, established service.

Firstly, a caveat to users, the Remote Authentication feature in Geeklog requires you to expose your password for the remote service when logging in. An unscrupulous systems administrator could modify the code to capture your password. Do not use this feature on sites you do not trust!

Remote Authentication ships with support for LiveJournal.com and Blogger.com accounts. When correctly configured the Remote Authentication system will allow registered LiveJournal or Blogger users to login with their remote account to your Geeklog instance. This feature is disabled by default, to enable it you must set the $_CONF['remoteauthentication'] variable to true in your config.php file, and disable user submission (set $_CONF['usersubmission'] to 0).

When enabled, each login form will include a drop down box of supported login services. The default option is your Geeklog site, listed with the text from your site name configuration from config.php ($_CONF[‘site_name’]). You can add or remove sites used for authentication simply by adding and removing authentication classes from $_CONF[‘path_system’]/classes/authentication. For example; to disable LiveJournal support, delete the LiveJournal.auth.class.php file.

As announced earlier, the old Geeklog themes (Classic, Clean, Digital Monchrome, Gameserver, Smooth Blue, XSilver, Yahoo) have now been removed from CVS and will no longer be maintained by us.

Instead, they are now available from the CVS of the GPlugs project.

And as a reminder: They are also available for download in a version that's compatible with Geeklog 1.3.10 and 1.3.11.