Simon is a hands-on software architect and has a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Reading. Over the past 12 years, he’s been involved in projects ranging from rich desktop clients and web applications through to highly scalable distributed systems and service-oriented architectures; predominantly within the finance industry. He's also undertaken consulting and training roles with a broader focus on people, process and technology.
Private blogs
No more messing with XML configuration files in Pebble 2.1
Pebble 1.x and 2.0 have always been able to provide a truely private blog, but required some messing with the web.xml or applicationContext-acegi-security.xml files respectively to manually secure those URLs that fall underneath the blog you want to make private. Also, this was only really possible in multi-blog mode where you wanted to make one or more blogs private. In Pebble 2.1, things are changing.
- Private blogs are a much more integral part of Pebble and they are very easy to create. A new list box has been added to the blog properties page that lets you assign zero or more "blog readers" to your blog. With none selected (the default), your blog is a public blog and accessible by anybody. With one or more users selected, your blog is private and only accessible by the set of blog owners, publishers, contributors and readers that you have defined. That's it - no more messing with security settings in XML configuration files.
- The RSS and Atom feeds for a private blog are also protected, but they are protected using HTTP Basic authentication. This means that if you have been authorised to access a private blog, you can subscribe to that private blog's newsfeeds via your newsreader (most let you enter a username/password pair for secured feeds).
- As before, you still have control over whether your blog (regardless of whether it is public or private) is included in the multi-blog aggregation features (i.e. the Pebble home page and multi-blog newsfeeds).
- A new
ExcerptDecoratorplugin has been added, which creates a simple excerpt for a blog entry if one doesn't exist already. Use this in combination with a private blog that *is* included in the multi-blog aggregation and you have a really easy way to push out newsfeeds that contain excerpts but require users to be registered to view the full content.
Just for completeness, here's a screenshot of the blog security settings.
So that's it - private blogs are easy to setup in the next Pebble release, which I'm looking to get out this month. If you want to try this out, please download the nightly build and give it a go. Feedback is welcomed and please use the pebble-user mailing list for support.
