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https://github.com/rsms/gitblog

Git-based blog/cms for PHP, meant as a replacement for Wordpress
https://github.com/rsms/gitblog

Last synced: 16 days ago
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Git-based blog/cms for PHP, meant as a replacement for Wordpress

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README 

        
# gitblog



A git-based blog/cms platform for PHP, meant as a replacement for Wordpress.



Post-action hooks in git are used to manage an intermediate cache which consist only of structured data (no formatting), allowing dynamic presentation. This is one of the biggest differences tech-wise in comparison to Jekyll and similar tools.



Licensed under MIT means free to use for everyone. See [LICENSE](http://github.com/rsms/gitblog/blob/master/LICENSE) for more information.



## Features



- Fully git-based -- no mysql or similar involved

- Everything is versioned

- Themes

- No custom file formats for content (only [JSON](http://json.org/), [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) (with [Markdown extra](http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/)) and HTML)

- High performance

- Hierarchical comments with optional spam filtering based on [Akismet](http://akismet.com/)

- Remote editing (git push/pull)

- Wordpress import

- [Plugins](http://github.com/rsms/gitblog/blob/master/docs/plugins.md)



(See section "Future features" for a list of possible future features)



## Installing & Getting started



Clone a copy of gitblog:



	$ cd /path/to/my-blog

	$ git clone git://github.com/rsms/gitblog.git



If your web server is not running as yourself, your group, or the root user, you need to change owner. In this example `www-data` is the web server user. (You will still be able to edit the blog.)



	$ chmod -R g+w .

	$ sudo chown -R www-data .



Open a web browser and point it to your `/my-blog/gitblog`. Enter email and your real name -- these will be used for commit messages. Also choose a good pass phrase which in combination with your email will grant you administration privileges in the web administration interface.



When you're done you should see a single "Hello world" post. Okay, all good.



> **What did just happen?** Gitblog initialized a git repository in `/path/to/my-blog` and added a few standard files and directories. If you ever would like to start over, just delete everything except the gitblog directory and visit `/my-blog/gitblog` in a browser again.



Let's try editing the hello world post:



	$ $EDITOR content/posts/*/*-*-hello-world.html



Make some changes, be creative!



To demonstrate that the "working tree" is indeed a working area and not the live stage, reload your web browser and see that the "Hello world" post is still not modified.



> **Tip:** You can view your work in progress by being signed in and appending `?preview` to the url.



Now, let's commit the changes, pusing them live:



	$ git commit -m 'Updated my awesome hello-world post' content



Reload your web browser and... voila!



> **Warnings when committing?** If you see `error: Could not access 'HEAD@{1}'` on stderr when committing, do not worry. This is an issue that currently do not affect gitblog, but we're looking into what causes it.



### Importing a Wordpress blog



If you have a Wordpress blog you would like to import, there is a built-in tool which does it for you! Just visit `/my-blog/gitblog/admin/import-wordpress.php` and follow the simple instructions.



## Documentation



The [docs directory](http://github.com/rsms/gitblog/tree/master/docs) contains a number of documents covering different parts of Gitblog.



## Requirements



- PHP 5.2 or newer (only standard modules are needed though)

- Git 1.6 or newer

- POSIX system



## Further play



The gb-config.php file (present in your site root) contains site-specific configuration. A default gb-config.php file, as it looks just after a blog has been setup, contains only the minimum set of paramters. There are a bunch of other paramters which might do something you whish.



Have a look in the file `gitblog/gitblog.php` -- scroll down a few lines and you'll find a class called `gb` which houses documentation and a list of all available configuration parameters, as well as their default values.



## Known bugs and issues



- Post-hook system is a bit shaky because of the nature of itself. Running scripts directly instead of POSTing to a URL would be better but many systems does not have CLI PHP or have another version than the web PHP.



## Future features



### Work in progress



- Web administration



### Planned



- Pingback

- Search



### Under consideration



- Configure what parts are versioned (e.g. disable versioning of comments)

- Alternate storage

- Caching (memcached, redis, etc)



## Authors



- Rasmus Andersson <rasmus notion.se>



## History



A strangely cold morning in june 2009 Mattias Arrelid pressed the "Yeah, upgrade Wordpress". What happened seconds later still brings me down sometimes... *Every file* on our server--removable by the web server--was deleted in an instant. Many years worth of photos, audio recordings and not to mention the 30+ web sites which disappeared into the void of an unrecoverable ext3 file system.



We swore to never again use Wordpress and to do backups.



As we all like Git--this pretty little creation of the open source community--the blog tool of our future was of course based on Git. But after giving a few days of research we had not found any tool that suited our taste. (The closest match was [Jekyll](http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/), however we wanted something more flexible, like Word...euhm). So what the heck, after all we are software engineers so why not write something ourselves?



Gitblog was born.