Michael Dale

I've decided to rewrite Bluetrait.

It's had a good run.

Getnews (the blog script that I wrote before Bluetrait) was aimed at providing a very basic blog with commenting support. It did this well, but a lot of it was hardcoded to my domain/style so it wasn't really useful for anyone else.

I wrote Bluetrait 1 as to allow others to easily use/install it. It had/has a very basic template type system. Over the revisions it has been slowly upgraded and now includes:

• Good spam filtering. I think I'll finally got to a stage where I'm happy with it.
• Awesome looking admin panel thanks to Stuart.
• Event Viewer (which I really like having)
• Basic RSS support
• User management.

It has worked well on my site for almost 3 years! But it has some limitations that are starting to annoy me. The biggest problem I currently have with it is the way the CMS side works.

There is no way to categories pages and as my project page grows it is becoming an issue.

So I'm going to take what I've learnt with Bluetrait 1 and rewrite it.

I'm aiming to make Bluetrait 2 able to cope with all kinds of content for example:

• RSS
• Atom
• Content/CMS
• Blog

The idea is that the core of Bluetrait will have a section that allows people to design their own plugins which allows the system to handle any kind of data output.

Bluetrait 2 will also require PHP 5 as I'm using the PDO database class to allow for almost any kind of database (mysql, sql lite etc).

So the coding has started. Plugin support is almost done. I don't expect to have anything finished this year, hopefully early next year.

Josh created a custom index.php way back in WordPress 1.5 days that removed the RSS feeds on the WordPress dashboard.

Up until now it wasn't really possible to this with a plugin nicely. WordPress 2.2 has added an API hook that although not relevant to the Dashboard it is in the right place!

So I've created a simple plugin, which you can download here, that removes the RSS feeds. Please note it requires WordPress 2.2.

I just read an interesting post here about what data is sent to the Akismet servers. A surprising amount, including the whole $_SERVER array!

I wouldn't be too happy with that myself. Bluetrait's implementation of the Akismet client sends the following information:

Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Bluetrait's implementation sends the following information:

Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Plus the $_SERVER array with the following information removed:

'HTTP_COOKIE',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST',
'HTTP_MAX_FORWARDS',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER',
'REDIRECT_STATUS',
'SERVER_PORT',
'PATH',
'DOCUMENT_ROOT',
'SERVER_ADMIN',
'QUERY_STRING',
'PHP_SELF' ;

Unfortunately this is more than I first stated, I'm going to review the data being sent. It shouldn't contain any extra data that is personal.

EDIT: Some more info here. Looks like Akismet sends the all cookies that are from that domain. i.e anything the client (the person posting the comment) is logged into. The post is a bit old (2005) so this behavior may have changed.

EDIT2: I just checked the source code from WordPress 2.1.2 it looks like cookies are no longer sent, everything else still is.

BTEV now has a WordPress plugin page

Version 0.3 of Bluetrait Event Viewer for Wordpress is now out.

You can download it here.

This version tracks more events (and allows you to override wp_login to track failed logins too).

Tested on Wordpress 2.0.9 and 2.1.2

I'm in the process of writing an event viewer (similar to the one in bluetrait) plugin for Wordpress.

Should be out sometime next month.

EDIT: An alpha version can be downloaded from here

Argh. Too much spam is getting through again; even with Akismet. So I'm in the process of writing a new spam class. The aim is to build a comment score (similar to email spam filtering programs) based on the following:

• Email Address/Name/Website
• Comment Body (number of links etc)
• If the user is registered
• If the user has successfully posted a comment before
• white and black lists
• response from akismet
• how old and how many comments a post has

So hopefully I can cut down the spam.

I suspect trying to have both a blog called Bluetrait and a piece of blog software called Bluetrait is a bad idea...

Things I'd like to add:

• gettext
• better plugin support (add_task, update checker, bluetrait version checking)
• categories
• upgrades to event management
• upgrades to spam system
• full UTF-8
• per-user time zone support
• caching
• faster/smaller

Sorry I broke the server for a bit while upgrading to PHP 5.2. It is all working now. :)

Nup it is still a bit broken. *goes to fix*.