Blooki

Welcome

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 05:09:36 GMT

Blooki is a simple yet powerful tool that combines features of weblogs and Wikis. It brings together simplicity of Blosxom and richness of MovableType allowing you to store and share things you know and to slice and dice that information almost any way you want.

Blooki provides readable and search engine friendly URLs, flexible and lightweight hook-based plugin architecture, simple and extensible template engine with custom tags/variables, config-driven customization, file-based data storage, easy setup, several execution options (standalone server, CGI, or mod_perl), and more.

You can read about Blooki features and philosophy or download, install and have fun with it.

Philosophy

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 05:09:35 GMT

Most of the good ideas implemented in Blooki have been borrowed from other tools and languages: simplicity and file-based data storage from Blosxom, hook-based extensible architecture and config-driven customization from Apache, template engine with custom tags and variables from Perl itself, super-easy install and several execution options from Instiki, rich object-oriented model from MovableType, free links from Wiki, and site design from Stopdesign.

Blooki has been design with several goals in mind: simplicity, succinctness, hackability, efficiency, and learnability.

Simplicity -- Provides small core with powerful, highly orthogonal modules on top of it.
Succinctness -- Gives you ability to solve common problems with little or no coding.
Hackability -- Allows to change (almost) everything, including the syntax.
Efficiency -- Driven by a template engine with multi-level lazy initialization and caching.
Learnability -- Requires very limited time and effort to learn.

Features

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 05:09:34 GMT

Dynamic publishing
Any changes made to pages, templates, or stylesheets are immediately visible.

Powerful plug-in architecture
While config-driven customization and extensible template engine minimizes the need to write custom plugins, Blooki features powerful plugin architecture that allows you to extend the system in many ways and easily change the existing functionality.

Template-based rendering
All pages that Blooki generates are defined using a simple Perl-based template language. Existing set of tags can be easily changed or extended with custom tags. Multiple templates per entry and different templates for each category are also supported. You can even associate a template with a particular URL (for example, to provide custom "file not found" and "not authorized" pages).

Super-easy installation
Blooki provides zero-step (for servers that use built-in webserver) or one-step (for servers that run using external webserver) install.

Multiple execution options
Blooki gives you a choice of single-threaded, forking, or multi-threaded daemon server (using built-in webserver), CGI, or mod_perl execution options.

Flexible archiving
Blooki supports archiving by day, month, year, category, or a combination of those; all this can also be applied to select posts from a particular category.

Config-driven customization
Almost all aspects of the system (templates, modules/plugins to run, and their configuration) can be customized by changing configuration files on a category-by-category basis.

Multiple categories per post
Blooki allows you to have an entry linked to multiple categories.

Web standard compliance
Everything that Blooki generates -- XHTML, CSS, and RSS code -- is in compliance with web standards out of the box.

RSS syndication
Blooki includes support for RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0, and Atom syndication formats.

Several markup choices
Not only does Blooki support several markup filters (Textile, Tiki, and simple ConvertBreaks), but it also gives you several ways to select what filters to apply (config file, template, and entry) and allows you to apply multiple filters.

Multiple sub-categories and sub-sites
Blooki allows you to have unlimited number of sub-categories and sub-sites. You can limit their visibility to/from other parts of the system by applying Hide and Root plugins.

Minimum requirements and dependencies
Blooki runs out of the box and only requires Perl 5.005 or later. Some plugins may have additional requirements.

Free for taking
Blooki is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0.