Andrew Hutchings

Typography for Habari

2009-08-05T18:59:11-04:00

A plugin for Habari that makes use of the relatively new PHP Typography class to improve entry typography through the use of hyphenation, spacing control, intelligent character replacement, and CSS hooks for styling. Typography for Habari also has the ability to apply correct capitalization to post titles, thanks to Adam Nolley's PHP port of John Gruber's title case rules.

Typography provides all the functionality of the Typogrify and SmartyPants libraries, so to avoid any potential issues:

If using the Habari Markdown plugin, disable SmartyPants
Disable Typogrify

You can find the latest version of Typography for Habari at GitHub.

Habari Plugin: Akismet Spam Filtering

2009-05-18T00:41:03-04:00

The recent trend of entries about Habari continues, with an Akismet plugin. Other alternatives exist if you're not a fan of Akismet. (Defensio, Mollom, Simple Blacklist, the core spam checker, etc.) ~~A TypePad AntiSpam plugin will be coming soon.~~ TypePad AntiSpam support was added to the Akismet plugin in version 0.1.0.

Akismet, or Automattic Kismet, is a spam filtering service created by Automattic, the corporation which employs most of the main developers of the weblog platform WordPress, and released on October 25, 2005. Akismet attempts to filter link spam from blog comments and spam TrackBack pings. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating blogs, and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet has captured over 10.1 billion spam comments and pings as of March 2009.

courtesy of Wikipedia

Download at Habari Extras

Changelog

0.1.1: A bug was squashed that prevented the Akismet provider from being selected.
0.1.0: TypePad AntiSpam support added.
0.0.1: Initial release of Habari Akismet.

Habari Plugin: Minify

2009-04-23T13:10:09-04:00

A plugin for Habari that makes use of the minify project to combine and compress javascript and CSS. Although this is basically just a minify wrapper, I'd still consider it alpha status, so use at your own risk!

From the minify project page:

Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching. This helps you follow several of Yahoo!'s Rules for High Performance Web Sites.

To enable minification for your theme stylesheet(s), you'll need to add them to the template_stylesheet stack, like so:

You can then remove the stylesheet from the head section of the theme HTML. Also, make sure the theme is calling theme_header() somewhere in the head section.

Download at GitHub

Habari Plugins: Cache Gists and an Update to Google Analytics

2009-04-21T15:52:05-04:00

As of last night, this site is running on Habari again (from Drupal, from Nisaba, from Habari...). I am using quite a few plugins for site optimization - here are two. The Google Analytics plugin is originally by Graham Christensen, the Cache Gists plugin is my own creation. Both of these plugins were tested with version 0.6 of Habari.

Google Analytics

Drupal's Google Analytics plugin had the useful ability to cache the analytics javascript file, which reduces the number of DNS lookups for visitors browsing your site. I decided to get my hands dirty, and added this option to the Google Analytics plugin from the Habari Extras repository.

While I was at it, I added https detection to the plugin. Stock Google Analytics code writes the script tag to the document after the page is loaded, but there are multiple issues with this feature, the primary one being that it doesn't play nice with real XHTML documents. The Google Analytics plugin now writes the script location into the document before sending it to the client.

Download here: ~~googleanalyticsextra-0.6-0.0.1.zip~~

Update 04.25.2009: Changes have been merged into the GoogleAnalytics plugin at Habari Extras.

Cache Gists

Similarly to the Google Analytics stock code, GitHub Gists are inserted into the document using document.write(). Unlike Google Analytics, Gists are usually right in the middle of page content, making document rendering jerky. This plugin caches the Gist to the webserver, avoiding document.write(). I published a previous entry about GitHub Gists here.The target audience for this one will be a small niche for sure, but here it is.

Download at Github

Future Updates

At some point, I may add the option to move the Gist stylesheet to the document head (if that's possible) or strip the Gist stylesheet from page to allow for easier custom styling. Also, I'd like to look into creating a minify plugin for Habari. Stay tuned!

Closing In on a Nisaba Public Release

2009-04-20T19:18:44-04:00

*[API]: Application Programming Interface *[XSS]: Cross-Site Scripting

Nisaba's code structure has changed drastically over the past few months, and I consider it almost ready for a public release. The initial release will not include Gnip support, as Gnip just released a new API for testing, and I want to get a solid product out for the first release.

Remaining Todos

~~Assign milestones to all bugs in Google Code~~
~~Comment processing, to enable Markdown support and prevent XSS~~
A graphical walkthrough
~~Cleanup of admin content areas~~
~~Comment & entry status changing~~

System Requirements

PHP 5.2.3+ (Nisaba uses Doctrine ORM)
Apache with mod_rewrite
MySQL 4.1+ (Possibly higher, all development is done with version 5.1)
Minimal testing has been done in browsers other than Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. There are no guarantees with Internet Explorer, but patches are welcome.