Battleangel | Personal

I did some improving on NP_LatestComments again. As I may have mentioned, the plugin in its original form is strikingly simple and at first glance it seems unnecessary to meddle with the operation. But alas, time after time I’ve been forced to mend the plugin with little bits and pieces of code in order to thwart the pesky people who come around to comment on my site. At first it was people using a short opening paragraph. Then it was long words breaking the layout. After that came people dumb enough to post their emails in plain text (thus breaking the layout and opening up a can of spam). Not to mention idiots that open up with an URL. Yesterday, I found someone opening up a statement with no less than FOUR smileys. I mean, seriously. So I had to append another preg_replace that cleans up the code between colons, such as in the entirely fictitious :insertbigfatsmileyhere: case.

Other than that I’m having two major problems. One is the lack of Paged Comments and the second is the dismal way in which the Multiblog option integrates.

The problem with Paged Comments is fairly straightforward. There is no option for paged comments. And no plugin (that I’ve seen) except for a small technology test (NP_PagerDemo) showing off NP_Pager. Now, if I could only figure out how to turn that demo into a piece of code that actually displays comments for a current item and on top of that uses the templates just as well as the core code.

The problem with Multiblogs is more serious. More so even than I previously realized despite having run two blogs for some time now. It breaks down into two basic obstacles. One being that the core search engine despite extensive fiddling fails to take into account both blogs. It would seems a great many items are just dropped for some reason. Could just be that the search code is flawed because I have a feeling that main items are left out as well. I sort of solved this problem by installing NP_MultiBlogs, which among other things can improve the internal search. It of course breaks the relevance calculation + it doesn’t fully take templates into account. Like the “Nothing found in search” template field.
As for the rest, like index, rss and archive I kind of prefer to keep both blogs separate so the shortcomings of Nucleus aren’t really a problem.
The second obstacle of running multiple blogs is related to fancy urls and permalinks. Unfortunately Nucleus needs to have a blogid variable set for most of its operations. Unfortunately that means that none of the solutions for making wordpress-like URLs actually work over two or more blogids. The best I could do was myserver/3/2006/4/24/title, showing an item with blogid 3. Now that is just not acceptable.
Supposedly the final v3.3 will have better fancy urls support but I’m counting on that support NOT extending to Multiblog users. Needless to say there are heaps of plugins (NP_CleanerURL, NP_UrlController, NP_CruftFree and NP_FancierURL) aimed at fixing the SEO problem, but none works with multiblogs. The problem seems to be that very few actually use the multiblog feature and those that do aren’t that picky with permalinks.