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.

Pebble 2.2 has been released and you can download it from SourceForge here. Changes include the following.

• Added a generic sidebar item (<sidebar:item/>). Blog entry titles are now shown on the requests page, rather than the permalink.
• Key events on blog entries, comments and TrackBacks (addition, removal, etc) are now recorded in an audit log (./pebble-audit.log, configurable in the /WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties file).
• The original author details of the blog entry are now retained when the blog entry is edited by somebody else.
• Added user maintainable profile information to user details.
• Added an "about author" sidebar component (<sidebar:aboutAuthor/>) that displays the profile information associated with the author of a blog entry, when viewing that blog entry on its permalinked page.
• Added support for custom favicon.ico files (place a favicon.ico file at /images/favicon.ico).
• Added an aboutAuthor page that displays profile information for the author of a blog entry. This is the default link used in the "Posted by ..." blog entry metadata if a user doesn't explicitly provide a website in their user details.

Support for the Atom Publishing Protocol didn't make it in this release but it will be coming.

Pebble 2.1 is now available to download from SourceForge, containing a couple of minor bug fixes and some small feature additions over the RC1 release.

• Added a way to determine and differentiate whether the people that leave comments are authenticated.
• Added a userThemesEnabled property in the pebble.properties file to indicate whether user themes are enabled. Setting this value to false ensures all blogs in a multi-blog installation use the default theme and look consistent.
• Fixed a small problem where the Ajax'd comment form wouldn't appear inline when using the basic textarea (i.e. not FCKeditor).
• Replaced the blog admin "reset password" feature with the ability to set the password to something specific.
• Patch from Stefan Reuter to allow dashes in blog names.
• The tilda/tilde (~) character is also now allowed in blog names.

Support for the Atom Publishing Protocol is now the most requested feature so this will form the basis for the Pebble 2.2 release. Until then ... I hope enjoy using the new release.

Pebble Home Page

More opensource java blog application

It's taken a little longer than I wanted, but Pebble 2.1-RC1 is available to download from SourceForge. The major changes are the Ajax comment previews, user configurable private blogs and the new theme templates. Here's a summary of everything.

• Fixed problem with local characters and HTML entities in comments.
• Added ability to get newsfeeds for private blogs via HTTP Basic authentication.
• Tweaks to bundled themes.
• Added support to upload multiple files at once (in the file browser).
• Fixed problem with ampersand character being escaped in website URLs when adding comments.
• PEBL-8 : Image option in Blog properties does not work
• Added Hungarian translation, provided by Zoltan Levardy.
• Fixed broken link in plugins help page.
• First version of Ajax comment system.
• Added some Scriptaculous effects.
• Added support for sup and sub tags in allowed HTML for comments.
• Fixed problem in blog entry/comment/TrackBack body truncation code to prevent truncation occurring in the middle of a HTML entity.
• Added an "about" property to blogs and a sidebar component that displays this content.
• Added generic feed reader sidebar component.
• Added ability to clone blog entries.
• Added ability to make a blog private, without needing to modify the Acegi configuration.
• Fixed "Number of blog entries in sidebar cannot be set to 0" bug.
• Added username/password labels to the login sidebar component.
• Fixed problem with archives in sidebar to prevent dates way back in the past being displayed.

Most things are straightforward enough and covered in the online help. There are a couple of things to be aware of though.

• Pebble's configuration settings are now specified in the /WEB-INF/pebble.properties file instead of /WEB-INF/applicationContext-pebble.xml file.
• For those of you using your own theme, you'll need to take a fresh copy of the default theme and customize it. The new theme layout is pretty much what I blogged about here although there have been a few minor changes. See the online help for the most up-to-date information on this, including a list of all the sidebar components and their parameters.

As always, please use the pebble-user mailing list for support and send over your feedback if you have any.

I've had many conversations with Pebble users about the complexities of themes and the common problems that crop up time and time again are as follows.

• As new functionality is added to Pebble, some of the older themes break, particularly around the sidebar items such as recent blog entries/comments/etc.
• Theme modification is often seen as complex, particularly for the 90% case where users simply want to add/remove items from the sidebar.
• It's really easy to cause a JSP compilation error when modifying a theme, again this is particularly notable when users are modifying their sidebar items.

The real power of Pebble themes comes from the fact that they use JSP as the implementation technology. The downside of this is that Pebble themes are seen as complex and fragile. In an attempt to rectify this, I've changed the way that themes work. I know, I can hear the groans now from those of you that have recently upgraded to Pebble 2.0, but wait.

The current themes are structured as follows.

 - screen.css
 - images
 - jsp
   - template.jsp
   - sidebar.jsp

And in Pebble 2.1 this is simplified a little.

 - screen.css
 - images
 - template.jsp

Okay, so the jsp subdirectory has gone and sidebar.jsp has been inlined into template.jsp, which now appears at the top level. It's a start, but the real changes appear in the template.jsp file. Here's what it looks like for the default theme.

<%--
  The main template into which all other content is placed. The following
  objects are available for use in templates.

   ... snip ...
--%>
<template:page>

  <div id="body">

    <%-- the RSS/Atom links --%>
    <div id="feeds">
      <template:feeds/>
    </div>

    <%-- the header, containing blog name and description --%>
    <div id="header">
      <div id="blogName"><span>${blog.name}</span></div>
      <div id="blogDescription"><span>${blog.description}</span></div>
    </div>

    <%-- the linear navigation links (e.g. < Previous | Home | Next >) --%> 
    <div id="linearNavigation">
      <template:linearNavigation/>
    </div>

    <%-- the sidebar that includes the calendar, recent blog entries, links, etc. --%>
    <div id="sidebar">
      <sidebar:about/>
      <sidebar:loginForm/>
      <sidebar:adminPanel/>
      <sidebar:navigation/>
      <sidebar:archivesByMonth/>
      <sidebar:categories/>
      <sidebar:tagCloud/>
      <sidebar:recentBlogEntries/>
      <sidebar:recentResponses/>
    </div>

    <%-- the main area into which content gets rendered --%>
    <div id="content">
      <template:content/>
    </div>

    <%-- the footer, containing the "powered by" link --%>
    <div id="footer">
      <template:poweredByPebble/>
    </div>

  </div>

</template:page>

I think you'll agree, this is much simpler than it ever was before. There are no messy JSP includes, the divs are cleanly separated and the sidebar items have been turned into proper components. It's still a JSP, but the power of JSP 2.x tag files has really cleaned things up.

If you're an existing Pebble user, I would really like your feedback on this. I'll be putting some decent online help together to document theme customization but if you have some use cases that you don't think will fit into this new model, please let me know. People think JSP is a bit rubbish. I disagree.