NAME
Bryar - A modular, extensible weblog tool
SYNOPSIS
Bryar->go();
DESCRIPTION
Bryar is a piece of blog production software, similar in style to (but
considerably more complex than) Rael Dornfest's "blosxom". The main
difference is extensibility, in terms of data collection and output
formatting. For instance, data can be acquired via DBD from a database,
or from the filesystem, or from any other source you can think of;
documents can be specified in HTML, or some other format which gets
turned into HTML; pages can be rendered with Template Toolkit,
HTML::Template, or any other template engine of your choice.
INSTALLING BRYAR
The short answer: run bryar-newblog in a directory served by your web
server. Then do what it tells you.
The long answer:
The only front-end working in this release is the CGI one; please don't
try this in mod_perl yet.
You'll need to write a little driver script which sets some parameters.
For instance, my bryar.cgi looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Bryar;
Bryar->go(
name => "Themes, Dreams and Crazy Schemes",
description => "Simon Cozens' weblog",
);
You can get away without any configuration options, but it's probably
wise to set something like the above up. Bryar will look in its current
directory for data files and templates, so if you're keeping your data
somewhere else, you'll want to set the datadir option too:
use Bryar;
Bryar->go( datadir => "/home/simon/blog" );
If Bryar finds a file called bryar.conf in the data directory, (which as
noted above, defaults to the current directory if not specified
explicitly) then it'll parse that as a colon-separated file full of
other options. I could, for instance, get away with
name: Themes, Dreams and Crazy Schemes
description: Simon Cozens' weblog
email: something@example.com
in a bryar.conf, and then would be able to use "Bryar->go()" with no
further parameters.
For details of interesting parameters, look in Bryar::Config. See also
Bryar::DataSource::DBI for how to database-back the blog.
Now you will need some templates to make your new blog look nice and
shiny. You can copy in the template.rss and template.html which come
with Bryar, and edit those. The bryar-newblog program which comes with
Bryar will set all this up for you. Look at Bryar::Renderer::TT for
hints as to how to customize the look-and-feel of the blog.
Once you're all up and running, (and your web server knows about
bryar.cgi) then you can start blogging! Just dump .txt files into your
data directory. If you used bryar-newblog, you should even have a sample
blog entry there for you.
USING BRYAR
This section describes Bryar from the end-users point of view - that is,
what do all those URLs do? If you're familiar with blosxom, this section
should be a breeze.
will return the most recent 20 posts. The default of 20 can be changed
by setting the "recent" configuration option.
will try to find a sub-blog - in blosxom terms, this is a subdirectory
underneath the main data directory. Sub-blogs can have their own
templates, but by default inherit the templates from the main blog.
(Oh, and another thing - you can stick templates either in the template
subdirectory or the main directory for your blog/sub-blog. Bryar looks
in both.)
If you want your main blog to contain things from sub-blogs, you can
change the value of the "depth" option, which defaults to one - no
descent into subblogs.
You can also export your blog as RSS:
And combine subblogging with RSS:
These are actually blosxom backwardly-compatible versions of the Bryar:
There's also an Atom feed:
And you can write your own formats; see the renderer class documentation
for how.
Each blog post will have a unique ID; you can get to an individual post
by specifying its ID:
And finally you can retrieve blog entries for a specific period of time:
Of course, you can combine all these components:
METHODS
Now for the programmer's interface to Bryar.
new
$self->new(%params)
Creates a new Bryar instance. You probably don't need to use this unless
you're programming your blog to do clever stuff. Use "go" instead.
go
$self->go()
Bryar->go(%params)
Does all the work of producing the blog. For parameters you might be
interested in setting, see "Bryar::Config".
posts_calendar
TODO: Move this out to something that is more flexible.
Return a data structure containing the days and weeks of a given month
and year with blog posts attached. See the "calendar" template for an
example.
config
Returns the Bryar::Config object for this blog. This is useful as the
blog object is passed into the templates by default.
LICENSE
This module is free software, and may be distributed under the same
terms as Perl itself.
THANKS
Steve Peters provided Atom support. Marco d'Itri contributed the
calendar, HTTP validators, caching, FastCGI, sitemaps, non-ASCII
charsets, bug fixes and optimizations.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2003, Simon Cozens "simon@cpan.org"
some parts Copyright 2007 David Cantrell "david@cantrell.org.uk"
some parts Copyright 2009 Marco d'Itri "md@linux.it"