Questions Regarding what Planet support and not

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="Shervin Asgari">

> Hello. I work in a company that is going to integrate a blog system for 50
> or so web sites.  We have spent about one year researching what kind of
> blog system we should go for.
> 
> We have found Roller the best suited, but we would like to use another
> Planet.

Keep in mind that Planet is just an aggregator, not a blog hosting system.

> Visual Layer
> Strong desire: Full Design freedom, i.e with the help of Velocity

Planet has extremely malleable templating through the htmltmpl engine - you
can produce almost any output based on it (every output you see from rss to
html is done this way).

> Operational Layer
> Desire: Option to see the most ative bloggers
> Desire: Multi Domain Support

Those are more relevant to blog hosting systems than an aggregator.

> Desire: Navigation through a calendar

Currently, Planet just operates as a single page aggregator, so you can't
store or navigate old posts. This was an intentional design decision early
on in the project, but it's something I'd reconsider given the right patch.

> Demand: Search in all blogs

See above - no storage means no searching. This seems to be another feature
more suited to a blog hosting system than an aggregator (though I can see
how it would be handy).

> Demand: Profile image of the blogger

With Planet you can use the channel image provided in the rss feed or define
your own in the config file. You can see the results of this on many popular
Open Source project Planet sites with 'hackergotchi' images of the authors.

> Demand: Different sort funtions on entries, i.e Last blogger, first 
> blogger etc

Don't quite understand that one.

> High desire: Option to sort on comment. i.e Last comment, most comment 
> blogg the last X day, etc
> High desire: Own Profile info on the blogger

Sounds like features more suited to a blog hosting tool.

> Demand: Date and time information on the Planet

You can use dates and times in any template (see the examples, including the
RSS templates).

> Demand: Number of comments

Most RSS feeds provide a comment URL, but not the number of commments
available, so this is very troublesome to do based on mere aggregation.

> Demand: Bloggers name

Of course - either from the rss feed itself, or your own definition in the
config. ;-)

> Nice to have: Mobile integration

You could create a template that outputs WML or something like that.


Hopefully the clarification that Planet is a blog aggregator only clears up
some of your questions.

- Jeff

-- 
GUADEC 2006: Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain            http://2006.guadec.org/
 
    "Gah. Out of coffee. Shall think whilst auto-caffeinating." - Telsa
                                   Gwynne