Thomas

Thomas is an incubator module for blogs created by Duck.

Bugs

• http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/6783

People

Duck duck@obala.net

ChuckHagenbuch is working on merging Thomas with Jonah

Description

Classic blog module with trackbacks and the possibility to copy your blog to other blog services.

Future

This module will be merged with Jonah so that there is a single Horde blog authoring application. Here is the plan:

• Jonah and Thomas merge into one application that creates feeds, one or more per user
  • Hippo is created as a content aggregation application
  • IMP gets feed reading capabilities in a virtual folder
  • Horde_Feed gets the ability to composite feeds together natively, and the ability to address feeds by universal names
  • The feed-reading portal block is retained and improved
  • A generic Horde linkback service is created (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback)

Jonah

The plan for Jonah is:

• The current code will be tagged so that it can be retrieved at a later date
  • Delivery lists will be removed
  • Features that are missing from Jonah but that exist in Thomas, such as categories, publishing to external services, etc., will be added (categories might be part of Horde_Content, as a horde_content_categories table, for generic usability)
  • Any user with access to the Jonah application will be able to create feeds
  • Feeds will become shares (any reason not to do this? allows shared posting)
  • There will be a setting to lock the default feed so that users can't create more, and $conf['share']['no_sharing'] will be honored.
  • ... what else?
  • The code will be updated to be PHP 5 code using Horde 4 features
  • Aggregate and composite feeds will be removed once Hippo is able to provide those features

Content Master

A generic Horde Content system will be created. Initially it will be very basic, providing a horde_content_master table that maps a global horde_content_id to a type and a local id (i.d., global id 32 is a blog post with id 7). This will be a building block for future Horde services, and for things like the linkback service.

In the future, an admin UI for creating and editing content types, including automatic generation of database tables and Rdo Mapper and domain objects, should be written for Horde_Content. This could be the backend of a pretty powerful CMS.

Linkback service

The linkback service will provide a generic endpoint for handling incoming trackbacks or pingbacks, and a database table that can track them by horde_content_id.

Hippo

Hippo will be a new Horde 4, PHP 5 application that aggregates content. It will initially be written to aggregate feeds, both internal from Jonah natively, and external (through Horde_Feed). Hippo will work with Horde_Content types and have Input and Output classes. Input classes will allow reading a content type, such as Horde_Feed feeds, Jonah internal feeds, comics, etc. Output classes will allow outputting a "remixed" feed from one or more inputs (such as combining an RSS feed with a few comics into a daily feed).

• There will be no direct storage of inputs or outputs, but Horde_Cache will be used.
  • Some content types such as comics might include code to fetch and store themselves locally
  • This application should be able to provide the backend for Planet Horde (http://planet.horde.org/)
  • This application should eventually be able to replace Klutz
  • Additional possible content types include podcasts, content from other Horde applications (iCalendar data from Kronolith), etc.

CMS front end?

I'm just going to preserve a quote from Duck here since I'm sure there's something useful to be distilled from it but I'm not capable of doing that distilling right now:

> IMO Jonah should remain as an news feeder or rss aggregator. A CMS module

> should have an editor system, tracing differences between content versions,

> track-backs, connected with other modules (attachments from Gollem, link to

> shopping items from Merk...) and so on. So I would be happy to see an

> dedicated powerful module then extending Jonah or Thomas. I guess as a lot of

> companies uses Horde groupware will really like to see and module for such

> publishing and linking to their data that are already in their groupware

> intranet.

--ChuckHagenbuch

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