PowerBlogs.Com Development

A few small changes

There was a nasty PHP bug in the signup code which added \ characters if the blog's title contained any sort of quotes. I eventually tracked this down to a "feature" controlled through the magic_quote_gpc variable in the main PHP configuration file. I suppose that this might do someone good, but turning it off did the trick. (The correct way to make your CGI secure is through using regular expressions to verify input, not by having your language automatically mangle every string that it sees.)

Tom discovered a bug in the stylesheet editing code where you couldn't clear out a user stylsheet. This is fixed now.

He also noticed that I forgot to include the code to set the variable which disables trackbacks. Fixed.

I also added a pair of features to comments:

  1. The ability to require a name when posting without a comment account.

  2. The ability to have every new comment emailed to the author of the post (useful for staying on top of comment discussions when you have very low comment volume or very long comment sunsets).

Finally, I changed the font size on the menu to be 12px instead of 14px. This should help it display properly at smaller resolutions.

Now it's time to rewrite the features page to reflect the features that the software actually has. If you read it now, you'd get the impression that at best it had a meagre comment system, when I think that it currently has the best blog comment system available (I'll admit that I'm biased, but even so I think that it's true).

Posted by Dev Team on Tuesday May 11, 2004 at 5:26am.