OpenMicroBlogger tips

• Administration: the first registered user is the only member of the administrators group. This person can_superuser which means they can edit and remove the notices of others. Subsequent registered users will be able to edit and remove their own notices.
• A private Microblog can be created by editing the app/models/Post.php data model. The members group means "any registered user" so replace the word members with something like myprivategroup, don’t use spaces or punctuation in the group name. Now browse to yoursite/?groups/new and add a bunch of e-mail addresses to the members box, one on each line. Modify the app/controllers/groups.php file to change the one-time e-mail that gets sent to your group members.
• Amazon Web services S3 storage for blobs can be enabled by changing the app/config/config.yml file, just change the collection_cache location for posts to "aws" and then set the awsAccessKey, awsSecretKey and awsBucket options.
• Warning! dbscript uses db-blobs in MySQL and PostgreSQL for its file-uploads, this can be a problem for big files and can really kill your database. See the above note about aws which actually causes all uploads to skate right past the db into aws-land. UPDATE 8/27 you can now change the collection_cache location for a table to uploads to put BLOBs in the /uploads folder
• The app/plugins/wp.php file has several prologue-theme-specific bits, but other "Tumblelog" wp-themes should be workable without too much trouble, the theme-name is set in the app/config/config.yml file

OMB is designed to run on as many hardware/software configurations as possible, it inherits that goal from the PHP framework it is made of, dbscript, which in turn inherited that ideal from the Linux operating system which is so useful due to this quality.

PHP4 has been EOL’d (not really, but it won’t be officially patched anymore), so you should definitely upgrade any PHP4 servers you find right away. On the other hand, there are some people who cannot change their build themselves and OMB has been designed to work on any old PHP server. The framework does improve PHP security by providing a consistent, centralized security model which is always there working in the background of dbscript apps.

Of course every tool has advantages and disadvantages, here’s a quick run-down of the dbscript pluses and minuses:

[ + ]

• restful controllers, using GET and POST
• restful URLs, designed to work without mod_rewrite
• Routes from Python — same as rails/django
• merb-style bootstrapper
• rails-style mvc
• “activeresult” model-aggregator/mapper
• has_many, has_one, has_and_belongs_to_many etc
• real model security: let_read, let_write
• content-negotiation
• crude adapters for wp-themes and wp-plugins
• few dependencies

[ - ]

• db adapters for mysql/postgresql only, so far
• o/r mapper API from merb would allow a real o/r mapper to be installed
• pretty slow
• lots of PHP4 object-oriented code, working on a hot-swappable pure-PHP5 version
• in-db sessions are a little hokey