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Plugins

The Blosxom Plugin Registry...

There is an ever-growing list of plugins developed by Blosxom users just like you. There are display plugins, fiddling with blog posts on the fly and providing additional template elements. Image plugins provide everything from convenient image references to resizing and creating an image gallery. Input plugins provide writebacks (comments and trackbacks), karma tracking, and email-to-blog gateways.

Activate plugin support...

1. Create a plugin folder/directory just about anywhere. About the only rule is that your plugins should not be viewable by the public; plugins are bits of programmatic code and often contain configuration options and passwords you wouldn't want any Tom, Dick, and Harry to read. So keep it out of your Web server's document root.

   You'll also need a state directory as many plugins maintain some files of their own and need a place to keep them.

   Here are few reasonable suggestions for where to put your plugins:

   • ISP
     A data/blosxom/plugins directory in your home directory is as good a place as any. If you have command-line access, these commands should create the plugins and plugins/state directories, along with all the intermediate directories on the path:

     mkdir -p ~/data/blosxom/plugins/state
     chmod -R 755 ~/data/blosxom/plugins/state

     If you only have FTP access, you should be able to create the data/blosxom/plugins/state hierarchy from the comfort of your favourite FTP application.
   • Mac OS X
     I suggest /Library/WebServer/Data/Blosxom/Plugins. If you used the Blosxom for Mac OS X installer, all this has been taken care of for you; otherwise, launch the Terminal application (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type:

     sudo mkdir -p /Library/WebServer/Data/Blosxom/Plugins
     sudo chmod -R 755 /Library/WebServer/Data/Blosxom/Plugins

     (You'll be prompted for your password, if any.)
   • Windows 2000/XP
     Create a new set of folders: c:\Inetpub\Data\Blosxom\Plugins\state from the Explorer.
2. Tell Blosxom where to find your plugins by altering the $plugin_dir configuration option in the blosxom.cgi script itself. Open up the Blosxom cgi script in your favourite text editor and find the following configuration section:

   # --- Plugins (Optional) -----
   # Where are my plugins kept?
   $plugin_dir = "";
   # Where should my modules keep their state information?
   $plugin_state_dir = "$plugin_dir/state";
   

   Change the value of $plugin_dir to reflect the location of the plugin directory you just created in step 1. Assuming you followed the advice above, here are the appropriate settings:
   • ISP
     You'll need to ask for the full-path to your home directory, prepending it to the data/blosxom/plugins/state. For instance, if your home directory were /home/sam, your plugin configuration would read:

     # Where are my plugins kept?
     $plugin_dir = "/home/sam/data/blosxom/plugins";

   • Mac OS X
     If you used the Blosxom for Mac OS X installer, you'll not need to do this--it's taken care of for you.

     # Where are my plugins kept?
     $plugin_dir = "/Library/WebServer/Data/Blosxom/Plugins";

   • Windows 2000/XP
     While the Windows filesystem uses backslashes to separate elements of a path, Perl uses forward-slashes, like so:

     # Where are my plugins kept?
     $plugin_dir = "c:/Inetpub/Data/Blosxom/Plugins";

Blosxom will automatically find and load your new plugin the next time you visit your blog.

Put your plugins in order...

If you'd like to control the order in which plugins load, prepend the filenames with numbers like: 00loadfirst, 50loadsometime, 99loadlast, and so forth.

Disable a plugin...