Dev Team
General
I just fixed a bug in the interface preferences page which wouldn't allow one to select manual formatting as the default.
Powerblogs has really great users. Today a new user helped me find (and hence fix) the following bugs:
Fixed the documentation for the List Post Template and the Individual Post Template.
Also, fixed an off-by-one error in the script to rewrite history (modify the dates on posts).
Update: The rewrite history bug is now actually fixed. It turned out not to be an off-by-one error, but a bug about how daylight savings time was handled.
Previewing a post has now been moved to a window which pops up, showing a normal blog page with what the post would look like. This way previewing won't be nearly so cramped as it used to be with the preview area above the post composition area.
Fixed the spelling checker to unselect words when selecting the next word.
Fixed the bug which caused the spell checker to not come up at all in IE. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE6 — it won't show the suggestions when selecting a new word, but this is progress. At least it shows the (possibly) mis-spelled words and allows one to manually correct them. I'll get it to fully work on IE soon. (It is still a beta feature, after all.)
Added a feature to the co-blogger report to allow for a maximum word count per post, so as not to reward a single enormous post in preference to many medium-sized posts.
There is now a spell checking tool available via the tools menu. It's still in BETA, but it should be pretty usable.
The Magic Comments Import script will now fetch embeded images from the posts its importing (and rewrites the post to display the local version).
At the request of Eugene Volokh, I've added a new report (available in the reports section) which generates statistics on the activity of all of the bloggers in a blog.
It assembles a fair number of statistics which makes for a very large table. As a result, I've also added an ability to get the data as a .csv (comma separated values) file for easy importing into a spreadsheet.
Post chains now get a page devoted to that post chain. Thus instead of clicking through to view each post in a post chain, a reader can just click the "on one page" link and read all of the posts in chronological order.
Powerblogs now offers two news plans: a $15/year plan and a $25/year plan. Designed for low-volume blogs, these plans should work well for people who want to blog only for friends and family, or for people who just want to try out blogging to see if they like it. (There will very shortly be an easy upgrade path from these plans to one of the high volume plans.)
So, if you know anyone who wants to get into blogging with great software but doesn't want to spend $5 a month, let them know! ;-)
I've been rewriting more of the code to optimize posting and editing. In the process, I discovered and fixed a few bugs, though most of them would only be noticeable if one used the rewrite history feature to back-date posts. The rest dealt with the chronological titles archive, which weren't being properly generated for categories.
That being said, posting and editing should be faster then they have been. I uploaded a number of speed optimizations. I've moved more functions over to the schedule/marshal paradign. I also rewrote the core loops in a few commonly called functions for writing archives so that they're now substantially faster. I think that the front archives and complete weekly archives page are now written in about one tenth the time that they had been taking. The chronological titles archive pages now take about half the time that they did previously. The RSS feed generation has been very marginally improved. All in all it should result in a noticeable increase in the speed of posting and publishing changes.
We're on the way to instantaneous publishing. :-)
I just comitted a few changes that should mildly improve the posting and editing speed. These changes won't be as dramatic as the ones from a few days ago, though every little bit helps on the quest to instantaneous response times.
The variables which can stick category lists into the post template now make each category name a link to that category's front page.
I've added two new variables to the post templates — [$CategoriesList$] and [$ParentheticalCategoriesList$]. They allow you to indicate in the post template which category or categories the post is in.