© Copyright 2011 John Obbele. All Rights Reserved.

ports4dotclear

ports4dotclear is a XML-RPC client to manage remotely entries on a DotClear2 server.

It is a bundle of Makefiles, Perl and Python scripts to format markdown files and parsed them into well-formatted xHTML documents. The resulting xHTML is send to a XML-RPC enabled DotClear2 blog, managing in the same time related media content, such as images, videos or SVG diagrams.

With ports4dotclear, you can post new blog entry, edit old ones or delete them. There is an archaic support for updating related media files, but none for managing blog comments or their categories.

Installation

hostname:sh $ mkdir MyDotClear2
hostname:sh $ cd !$
hostname:sh $ git clone github.com/obbele/ports4dotclear.git

Requirements

The present system was test on a Fedora 13 box where you only need the additional following packages:

• perl-XML-Simple
• perl-XML-SAX
• perl-XML-SAX-Writer
• perl-Test-Simple
• perl-Test-Harness
• python (>= 2.5)
• highlight
• xdg-utils
• make
• (git, to retrieve the present software)

The various scripts rely heavily on Makefiles and POSIX functionalities (stream redirection, pipes). I've tried to avoid linux- or bash- specifics functions, so you should be able to run it on any POSIX OSs, including w32/cygwin or *BSD derivatives. Contact me if you run find any problems.

Configuration

You will have to manually create a configuration file with you DotClear2 XMl-RPC credentials in Scripts/XML-RPC/. See Scripts/XML-RPC/default.cfg for example.

Suggested versioning system

ports4dotclear was created to be used with versioning systems such as Git. Yet, if you wish to keep track of your messages with git, it is recommended to separate your private data (message folders and Scripts/XML-RPC/*.cfg configuration files) from the ports4dotclear git repository. Otherwise, you may inadvertently loose data when pulling a new version of ports4dotclear or publish private data on the Internet (your XML-RPC credentials) when sending me a patch.

One /hackish/ solution is to split your ports4dotclear folder in two git repositories. One in .git keeping track of the ports4dotclear files, on in .msg.git keeping track of your private data. See the SH script init_2nd_repository.sh for a working example.

hostname:sh $ sh ./init_2nd_repository --help
hostname:sh $ sh ./init_2nd_repository

Usage

To create a new 'foobar' message folder and publish it to DotClear on 'myServer', simply type from the ports4dotclear root folder:

hostname:sh $ # configure XML-RPC
hostname:sh $ cp Scripts/XML-RPC/{default,myServer}.cfg
hostname:sh $ vim Scripts/XML-RPC/myServer.cfg

hostname:sh $ make new
Enter directory name: foobar
New directory created: [999_foobar]

hostname:sh $ cd 999_foobar

hostname:sh/999_foobar $ make edit

hostname:sh/999_foobar $ make view

hostname:sh/999_foobar $ make CONFIG=myServer publish

Help

More help is available from the Makefiles with the help target:

hostname:sh $ make help

And from the Perl and Python scripts:

hostname:sh $ perldoc Scripts/ResizeSVG.pl
hostname:sh $ pydoc ./Scripts/XML-RPC/dotclear.py

Note that XML-RPC/dotclear.py is a standalone script.

hostname:sh $ ./Scripts/XML-RPC/dotclear.py --help

TestSuite

A simple testsuite based on Perl::Harness can be found in Tests. To run it, you should first edit the test.cfg file and provide some XML-RPC credentials. It is strongly recommended to perform XML-RPC tests on a dummy DotClear installation, not on your "official" blog.

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