Hmmm, it's been a little quiet over here recently. This is mainly because I've been blogging a lot over at Coding the Architecture, although I've also been doing a little Pebble work here and there. So, to kill two birds with one stone, here's a brief look at some of the new features that will be in the next version of Pebble.

Author information

Pebble works well as a nice little multi-contributor blog, but it never really gave much visibility that there were different content authors. Pebble 2.2 introduced a feature whereby an author's profile could be displayed in the sidebar on a permalinked blog entry page, but Pebble 2.3 takes this a step further by introducing an author specific page.

As the above screenshot shows; you get the author's profile, a summary of their three most recent blog entries and a link to an author specific RSS feed.

Themes

In Pebble 2.3, the overall blog in multi-blog mode can now use the same themes as the regular blogs and this is done in the normal way - by choosing the theme from a dropdown on the Pebble properties page. The benefit of this is that you no longer have to manually edit the _pebble theme to customize the multi-blog pages.

In addition to this, some of the common pages (e.g. login and error pages) have been stripped back for simplicity and security. For example, in the current version of Pebble you can define a blog to be secure, but it's still possible that the theme you use for your login page could expose your list of recent blog entries, etc.

Enhanced statistics

Pebble 2.3 includes some enhanced statistics features, including :

• Requests by type (page, newsfeed or file - total and unique by IP address)
• Requests by hour (total and unique by IP address)
• User agents
• Requests by country (thanks to MaxMind's free GeoLite Country)
• Raw log file in plain text
• Raw log file in tab delimited format

Also, as shown in the above screenshot, you can easily navigate through statistics pages using the previous/next day/month links.

Custom home page

Although Pebble is primarily a blogging solution, a few users (myself included) find it a neat little tool for hosting static websites that additionally have a blog component (e.g. for site news). Pebble 2.3 allows you to do this very easily by giving you the ability to use a static page as a custom home page. In other words, rather than seeing a list of blog entries, people visiting the home page can see a static page instead. To do this, you just select the static page that you'd like to use from a dropdown list on the blog properties page.

The screenshot above shows a website that I've just launched for the local pre-school. The theme has been stripped back of most of the blog-like navigation, instead being replaced with a collection of links to static pages. Additionally, a static page is being used as the home page. The result looks like a static site, but it has all the benefits of an interactive blog with the ability to modify content by logging in from anywhere and using the WYSIWYG editor (FCKeditor). It's like a mini content management system. :-)

Summary

There are also some additional changes such as a GZIP filter and better caching to improve overall performance, some HTML clean-up, the ability to subscribe via e-mail, etc.

I must admit that I've had quite a lot fun putting these changes in, particularly because they are features that I've wanted myself. I do have some other things that I'd like to implement, but I'll probably try to get a release out in the next couple of weeks because it's been a long time since the last one. I've switched on my nightly build server, so you can always grab the latest version if you want to.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 10 December 2007 22:17:00 GMT #