Flux CMS DevBlog

Thanks to our intern Benjamin, Flux CMS has now support for sending trackbacks, as well.

If you make a new Blog Post, on the bottom there's a field to fill in the Trackback URLs and also to enable autodiscovery of trackback URLs, if linked blogposts support that (most modern Blog systems do support that).

leo @ 23.08.2005 17:13 CET
Thank you very much Benjamin. Great work!

Haven't the time now to test it well. But looks great. Only one question: Flux CMS is a modern Blog system, isn't it? ;-)

Perhaps you can enable planet internal trackbacks per default. Or is this to risky, I don't know the internal of the trackback ping protocol.

leo @ 23.08.2005 17:28 CET
I have testet it now. Perhaps Flux CMS isn't a modern Blog System., elsewhere the "Trackback Auto Discovery"-Fuction implementation won't work.
http://leo.freeflux.net/blog/archiv/trackback-now.html

chregu @ 23.08.2005 18:10 CET
It's not too risky, just too much work to make that globally useful and not just for Planet Freeflux :)

frank @ 23.08.2005 21:26 CET
Are the trackbacks public, means if someone tracks you back :) is it shown in the blog? Btw. actually I didn't test it yet.

leo @ 23.08.2005 22:17 CET
@Frank: You have to approve it in your admin interface and than it looks like a comment.

@Chregu & Benjamin: Many thanks for your work. Everything works now great. OK, maybe there should be a posibility to send my email also with the trackback (of course not with the default configuration). This will make it possible to display my super cool gravantar also in trackbacks ;-)

Chregu @ 23.08.2005 22:25 CET
Frank: Receiving Trackbacks does work since quite some time in Flux CMS. And as leo said, you have to approve incoming trackbacks to make them public (a lot of spam is coming from trackbacks, if you're on the "blogs-to-be-spammed" of the spammers), otherwise they stay in the moderated queue and are deleted after 14 days.

Leo: Sending the email is not in the trackback specs :) We could add that, of course, just for ourselves, but again, too much work right now :)

leo @ 23.08.2005 22:49 CET
Oh, ok perhaps we change the specs when you win some time ;-)

But I found a small bug, there is something with the time which work's not proberly. There's a diverence about two hours from the ping time to the displayed time.

@leo's @ 23.08.2005 23:57 CET (Trackback)
Der neue Lehrling (Azubi/Stifft) des Amts für Planung müsste sich schon in seiner ersten Woche ordentlich ins Zeug legen. Der Kerl scheint was drauf zu haben, er hat inzwischen bereits das gewünschte Trackbackprotokol in Flux CMS implementiert. Vielen Dank und vielen Erfolg für dein Praktikum und deine Lehre Benjamin

chregu @ 24.08.2005 09:15 CET
leo: The time bug is fixed, we saved in localtime instead of GMT :)

leo @ 24.08.2005 09:35 CET
Great!

frank @ 24.08.2005 10:51 CET
@both: Got it. Works perfect. :)
@chregu: Is it possible to split comments and trackbacks? At the first view, for me, it wasn't quite clear, what is the trackback and a normal comment until I discovered the "CESTTRACKBACK" :). IMHO it would be also fine to have some css-trackback-statements (actually I don't know the right name for it) for highlighting/emphasize trackbacks. Erm, and as you did it with Comments, counting, that feature for trackbacks would be also nice. :) One more thing: approving trackbacks via the "he, you got a new trackback"-mail would be awesome. Means you provide an url (for example with an "unique" md5 sum - the encrypted complete post/get command...) in this mail, I'll click it, and the trackback is approved. :)

chregu @ 24.08.2005 11:01 CET
frank: The default templates had a bug for nicer trackback display :)

Add/change the following in your blog.xsl and it should look nice:

+ <xsl:template match="xhtml:span[@class='comment_type' ]" mode="xhtml">
+ <xsl:if test="text() = 'TRACKBACK'">
+ (Trackback)
+ </xsl:if>
+ </xsl:template>
+
<xsl:template match="xhtml:span[@class='comment_author']" mode="xhtml">
- <xsl:value-of select="."/>
+ <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
</xsl:template>

Counting trackbacks? Mmmh, theoretically possible. They are currently counted as comments, as they are in the same DB table. So we would have to change some DB queries to get that info. As trackbacks are not that widely used, I don't actually see much benefit in that, but patches are always welcome.

CSS Trackback statements: Adjust your xslt and you can do that :) The above example gives you a hint, where to start.

Approval-link: Very nice idea. I'll see, that we can implement that soon (maybe we still need/want the login credentials, I'm not sure about that, theoretically the MD5 "authentication" would be enough)

frank @ 25.08.2005 12:57 CET
@chregu: Impressive! The speed of your implementation of the "Modification URI"! And it works perfect... :-)

Flux CMS DevBlog @ 25.08.2005 17:43 CET (Trackback)
After a suggestion by Frank and some former nagging by Alain I finally added the possibility to accept or reject comments with one click from the notification mail. You don't even have to login to make a rejected comment approved or an approved rejected....

leo @ 26.08.2005 14:36 CET
Again trouble with the Trackback. The Trackback I've send to http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/16/archive/swiss-blogs-map.html links not to the correct site :-(

chregu @ 26.08.2005 14:39 CET
already fixed :)

leo @ 26.08.2005 14:54 CET
You're real fast!
Maybe a bit off topic, but I "hacked" Planet Freeflux. Posting some php/html code crash the design from the planet.

leo @ 26.08.2005 15:06 CET
I've often have blog entries which have a lot of links in it, so auto-discovery will sometimes use a lot of time. I think you have perhaps to add a status bar or something like this, I know that is not that easy. But that will give a better usability to "not-so-advanced-users" (not shure if they whant to use trackbacks, but you never know).

chregu @ 26.08.2005 15:14 CET
If you have a lot of links, don't use "Auto discovery" but are your trackbacks by hand :)

A Status bar would be nice, of course, but really not that easy to implement

leo @ 15.09.2005 11:37 CET
Why is there in my blog now link on the trackbacktitle?

chregu @ 15.09.2005 12:06 CET
leo: Hä? More info please :)

leo @ 15.09.2005 14:22 CET
This comment was writen a bit to fast ;-)

I try it again: In this blog the title of a trackback is linked to the original blog post, in my blog it doesn't. Why this won't work at my blog? Something with the xsl file?

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