Simon,
I'm writing a content management system on top of Pebble 2.0 and since it needs to handle additional file types apart from images, files and themes I'm considering refactoring the FileManager and the FileMetaData classes to support additional types so I can leverage existing actions etc.

Would you be inclined to patch the current source code if I send you a patch or should I rather reimplement the classes myself since you wont patch anyways?

Thanks.

As always updating to a new version of Pebble was very easy. I really like the new block of administration links. They significantly decrease the effort it takes to add new users and will help keep the admin time down to a minimum. The addition of those links was more than enough to convince me to deploy the new version on my 'production' machine (i.e. my server) rather than merely on the 'development' machine (i.e. my laptop).

I do have one minor question: how do I get the 'pebble' theme to show up on the front page of my multi-blog deployment? I have several blogs hosted on one server and I reset the theme on each individual blog to match my preference. However, I don't see an interface for so updating the http://domain/pebble/ page. I presume this page is supposed to use a 'default' theme. In fact, it is using the theme I see displayed on your blog right now. However, I really like the 'pebble' theme and would like to see it even when I am merely doing administrative fiddling with the blogs.

Simon,

I have patched Pebble 2.0RC2 to make it possible to handle additional filetypes using the core Pebble framework. I have done it by modifying the net.sourceforge.pebble.domain.FileMetaData and moving the information about the possible filetypes to an enum (net.sourceforge.pebble.domain.TypeEnum). This enum may be subclassed in my application to provide support for additional filetypes. I have used the enum from Jakarta Commons Lang because Java 5 enums doesn't support subclassing.

The filetypes usable by the Pebble instance is configured using a factory (net.sourceforge.pebble.domain.TypeEnumFactory) which is instantiated and set in the net.sourceforge.pebble.Configuration object using the applicationContext-pebble.xml file. The actual bean set is configured from the included pebble_import_factories.xml file since I need to replace the factory easily from my build.xml. I also need to replace the FileDAOFactory so that bean definition has been moved to the xml-file as well.

The applicationContext-acegi-security.xml has been modified as well to import a bean instance from pebble_import_acegi.xml since I also need to be able to easily add something here from my build.

I have put the patch file itself on my blog for downloading (http://lekkimworld.com/files/pebble_patches/pebble2.0RC2_filetypes_04092006.patch). I have also put a modified Pebble build on my blog for download (http://lekkimworld.com/files/pebble_patches/hrm_pebble_04092006.war) where you can see how the final result looks like with an added filetype (Polar HRM Files). As you might notice I have also added the possibility of specifying whether the individual filetypes may be managed and whether new directories may be added to the containing filetype directory by the user.

Let me know what you think.

Hi Mikkel - sorry, I've not had a chance to look through this yet. I want to get 2.0 out and then start incorporating additional functionality like this. E-mail for patches would be great, although the JIRA instance is back up again if you want to use that. :-)

Thanks Herman. You can find more information about e-mail configuration here.

I needed to do this recently but ended up splitting the blogs into two single-user blogs instead og one multi-user blog.

I think what you are asking can be done but at present you need to use Apache and a module like mod_html to fixup the HTML returned by Pebble.