Syncato 0.6 available

Syncato 0.6 is now available for download. This release is a substantial improvement over the 0.5 release, but is still mainly aimed at people who are pretty technical.

Syncato is the weblog system that runs Inspirational Technology. Its major distinguishing characteristic is that it is based heavily around the concept of manipulating XML fragments via XPath and XSL-T. This principal is used to implement the system as well as being exposed to the world via XPath in the URL. Using XML in this way results in a very powerful system for the storage of all kinds of data.

The data storage architecture is an open container for any type of XML fragment that you want to throw into it. The system then provides the ability to pick from that container whatever you want to include within your posts. This mechanism also encourages you to include richer markup within you posts. Syncato basically encourages you to either make up tags that mean something specific to you or to use standard markup in a way that provides some additional meaning.

For example, in my posts I sometimes recommend products and then include a link to Amazon for the product. To make this simpler I created a new "asin" tag that includes the Amazon product identifier. When the site is rendered the tag gets converted into the appropriate markup for Amazon product links. However, beyond that it also enables you to do interesting things like get a page containing all posts that have recommended products on Amazon. This kind of thing is all accomplished via XPath in the URL.

http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item[//asin]?t=front-page

This is just a simple example, but the possibilities are completely open depending on how you markup your posts.

The single biggest change in the 0.6 release is the inclusion of a file based database in addition to the Berkeley DB XML database. This provides a much simpler way to get an initial system up and running. The dependencies are reduced to just Python, libxml, libxslt, Webware and a webserver. It's still harder to install then I'd like, but it's getting better. The file database works well for small data sets up to a few hundred entries. From there you can then update to Berkeley DB XML to take advantage of its indexing capabilities. Since everything is XML it's pretty easy to convert from one database type to another.

The other notable change in this release is the inclusion of the Blogger and Metaweblog APIs. Darryl VanDorp stepped up to the plate and got them working just in time to be included.

Here's a list of what else changed this time around.

• Added comment support.
• Moved weblog pings into a separate thread.
• Made pings generic so that any site that supports the weblogs.com interface can pe pinged.
• Added technorati pings to the default configuration.
• Added a very rudimentary HTML administration interface. (Just add and edit entries)
• Added the PathUpdate API to enable document contruction and modification using XPath to select nodes.
• Added category RSS feeds
• Added a file based database to make the software easier to get up and running.
• The file based database is the default out of the box.
• Began rearranging the XSL files to start separating user styles from system styles.
• Initial Blogger and Metaweblog API implementations. (thanks Darryl VanDorp)
• Changed the command line scripts to use the web interface instead of accessing the database directly.
• Switched categories to key off of title instead of id.
• Substantial improvements in the stability of the Berkeley DB XML backend.
• Changed the directory structure for servlets. There are now three types based on access restrictions.

Posted by Kimbro Staken