Pebble 1.7-beta1 available

Pebble 1.7-beta1 is available to download from SourceForge. The major enhancements are as follows and you can see the full list in the changelog.

  • Blog listeners
  • Blog entry listeners
  • Comment listeners
  • TrackBack listeners
  • HTML pages now use CSS positioning rather than nested tables.
  • Inclusion of nofollow decorator.
  • Comment and TrackBack spam protection.

Plugin APIs

Essentially, the biggest change between 1.6 and 1.7 is the addition of the 4 new plugin APIs that I've talked about before - comment and TrackBack, blog entry and blog listeners. As with the rest of Pebble, plugins can be managed through the web interface where you can perform the following.

  • Change the plugins that are configured for your blog.
  • Modify the plugin properties that are configured for your plugins.
  • Restart (reload) your blog to activate your new configuration.
To support this, a new plugins page has been added and details of this can be found in the Pebble documentation in the distribution, or online here. Information about writing listener implementations is also available in the documentation.

Comment and TrackBack spam

The main driver for doing an early release of Pebble is comment and TrackBack spam, especially because there seems to be deluge of new spam on a lot of sites at the moment. I finally got around to implementing PEB-4 and one new feature is the ability to let you manually moderate incoming responses. On arrival, each response can be marked as pending and it's up to a blog contributor to approve or reject the response before it is published. When used in conjunction with e-mail notiications, the blog owner will receive an e-mail asking them to approve/reject the response.

Another new feature is the ability for Pebble to automatically filter out responses that it thinks are spam. Included in the Pebble distribution are several listener implementations that you can use to help fight comment and TrackBack spam on your blog. New responses (comments and TrackBacks) start off with a "spam score" of 0 points before being processed by the listeners that you have configured. When using the recommended list of listeners the following steps take place each time a response is added.

  1. The number of links is checked and if greater than the threshold, the response is marked as pending and the spam score is increased by 1 point.
  2. The content is checked against the list of regular expressions and if the number of occurences exceeds the threshold, the response is marked as pending and the spam score is increased by 1 point. This is repeated for the response title, author and website.
  3. The spam score of the response is checked against the threshold and if exceeded, marks the response as rejected.
  4. The status of the response is checked and if rejected, the response is deleted.
  5. An e-mail notification is sent if the status of the response is approved or pending.
Using the supplied plugins provides a good starting point for fighting spam and you can extend this by writing your own. Full details of these listeners and their configuration can be found in Comment and TrackBack Spam.

Upgrade notes

As a beta release, there are a few upgrade notes.

  • Some of the existing functionality (e.g. e-mail notifications and XML-RPC pings) is now implemented through plugins, so you'll need to configure the relevant listeners if you'd like to continue using these features. Please see blog entry listeners, comment listeners and TrackBack listeners in the documentation for more details.
  • The default theme is now implemented using CSS positioning and some of the JSPs have been updated to reflect the new functionality available (e.g. comment approval). Theme upgrade instructions are missing from the documentation set and backwards compatibility to older themes has not been tested yet.
  • Limited testing has been performed on Tomcat and Resin.

This release is feature complete and apart from any bugs that arise over the next week or so, further documentation updates are the only thing outstanding from a final 1.7 release. Please use JIRA or the pebble-users mailing list if you have any problems. Enjoy!

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Posted by Simon Brown on 02 February 2005 20:18:45 GMT #


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Re: Pebble 1.7-beta1 available

Comment from Kelt on 17 November 2008 18:06:49 GMT #
I've been comparing Pebble to other CMS solutions (I suggest adding it to the CMS wiki page on wikipedia). I noticed that Pebble is extremely fast at processing pages and seems to have good extensibility (event handlers and such) although I haven't actually take a look at that. I like that you are using xml as the database however, this means that you loose the advantages of a relational database; for example, if I wanted to find all my blog entries that user "X" had commented on past the date "Y" and contains the word "Z." This would be a simple query in sql. One other thing that I couldn't figure out is where are plugins for Pebble? Is there a large community for Pebble? If you look at other CMS software you will find a hosted list of Pebble plugins for a variety of things such as Amazon, Anti-spam, Google, and even math latex and image processing. In order for a CMS to be successful it needs a good host of plugins which means you need a community of developers that will program plugins for your CMS engine. I really like the name of the CMS and the UI design. If only Pebble used a jdbc database instead of propritary xml layouts.
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Re: Pebble 1.7-beta1 available

Comment from Kelt on 17 November 2008 18:10:29 GMT #
Oh, something else I'd love to see in a CMS system is a good SOAP API. Serve up some WSDLs that developers can use to extend the CMS and I think you will have yourself an old fashion development throw down.

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