Wed, 17 Aug 2005

Status 08/17/2005

SourceForge switched the mount to read-only so we've taken down comments and other interactive features from this web-site.

I'm working on PyBlosxom 1.3 and project infrastructure. In the queue:

  • pyblosxom 1.3 changes
    • fix bugs
    • flesh out variables for native RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3 flavours
  • generate a todo list for the web-site
  • add CVS usage blurbs to the development howto

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Mon, 25 Jul 2005

Security issue: config.pyc vulnerability

Zack sends this email:

Hello,

I discovered this vulnerability while playing with pyblosxom,  
which uses python files to store configuration information. The  
way it is packaged by Debian, the global config file /etc/ 
pyblosxom/config.py is created with 640 permissions, owned by the  
root user and the www-data group, of which apache httpd is a  
member. When the config file is imported by pyblosxom, a  
config.pyc is created with 644 permissions. If, for example, an  
XMLRPC password is specified in that file, it will be readable by  
any user.

We're looking into how we can alleviate this issue. We've contacted the Debian maintainer and will work with him to fix the issue in Debian. I haven't looked into whether this affects other distributions or not.

In the meantime if you're running PyBlosxom in such a way, make sure the permissions to your config.pyc file are appropriate.

Tue, 21 Jun 2005

Contributed plugins 1.2.2 released

This is the third release of the contributed plugins pack for PyBlosxom 1.2.

Here's the list of changes between contributed pack 1.2.1 and 1.2.2:

General
  • New CHANGELOG.txt file which describes the changes between this version and the last as well as compatability and behavior issues.
  • New README.txt file which describes what's in the contributed plugins pack, where you can find it, and various other things about the contributed plugins pack.
genericwiki
  • Matej updated genericwiki so that it works as an entryparser as well as a preformatter. Will fixed up the documentation. genericwiki was moved from the preformatter directory to the entryparser directory. Thanks Matej!
pycategories
  • Now has two new properites "category_start" which gets printed once before printing the category list and "category_finish" which gets printed once after printing the category list. Additionally, the default values for "category_begin" and "category_end" were fixed. This makes the default output for pycategories (x)html compliant. Thanks Joseph!
comments
  • comments no longer shows comments by default! In order to view comments for a given entry, you must append "showcomments=yes" to the querystring. THIS IS NOT A BACKWARDS-COMPATIBLE CHANGE! Thanks David!
  • comments no longer has documentation for the unused comments-rejected-words property.
  • comments no longer requires the email field.
  • all the flavour templates for the comments plugin have been updated.
  • We cleaned up the comment error messages so they're useful to the user. Thanks Nathaniel!
w3cdate
  • w3cdate plugin now provides $w3cdate in head and foot templates. It no longer requires PyXML. Thanks to Steven and Matej!

Thanks to Steven, David, Joseph, Matej, and Nathaniel for their contributions and help.

If you find problems with contributed plugins, visit this page on how to contact us. "Problems" could be bugs, feature-requests, or setup issues.

Find the contributed plugin pack here (contrib.1.2.2.tar.gz).

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Wed, 01 Jun 2005

PyBlosxom 1.2.1 released

This is a minor bugfix for PyBlosxom 1.2. If you use the conditionalhttp plugin, you'll want to upgrade. Otherwise, it's not crucial.

Changes:

  • Fixed a problem where the blosxom renderer never c hecked to see if it had already rendered the page. This affects the conditionalhttp plugin, but not much else.
  • Removed an extra filestat.
  • Added a setTimeLazy method to the FileEntry class.

If you have any problems, check out the PyBlosxom Manual and if that doesn't help, send us questions on the pyblosxom-users mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

PyBlosxom users

Thanks to work from both Robert Wall and David Geller, I've added a list of PyBlosxom users to the site. David did some work that makes the output a lot nicer, but I haven't quite gotten to working his script into the system. So this is a semi-temporary kluge for the time being.

Fri, 13 May 2005

Updated PyBlosxom 1.2 manual

I've been continuing to work on the PyBlosxom manual. I've put the latest version on the site. You can find the following information there:

  • information installation
  • information on setup and configuration
  • a list of config.py variables and what they do
  • information on plugins
  • information on flavours
  • information on static rendering
  • information on syndication options
  • how to write entries
  • ...

If you're new to PyBlosxom, having problems with PyBlosxom, or are curious about things, check out the latest PyBlosxom 1.2 manual.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Sat, 07 May 2005

Contributed plugins 1.2.1 released

This is the second release of the contributed plugins pack for PyBlosxom 1.2. In terms of functionality, there were a bunch of fixes to the comments and trackbacks components and I overhauled pycategories. Beyond that, there were a lot of license changes (or in most cases license applications) and some documentation changes. In general, this release is a huge milestone for sorting out the big mess that was the contributed plugins.

Bravo to Wari, Ted, Steven, Blake, Bill, and everyone else that was involved in pulling this together.

If you find problems with contributed plugins, visit this page on how to contact us. "Problems" could be bugs, feature-requests, or setup issues.

Find the contributed plugin pack here (contrib.1.2.1.tar.gz).

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Sat, 09 Apr 2005

Site update

I updated the site to use PyBlosxom 1.2. I also made some minor changes to the registry plugin that drives the Plugin Registry and the Flavour Registry. If you notice any problems, let us know on the pyblosxom-devel mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Tue, 29 Mar 2005

Site updates and PyBlosxom's future plans

I did a quick update to the links on the menu bar of the web-site (you can see the menu bar to the left there). We need to maintain separate versions of the documentation for prior versions of PyBlosxom and it was getting messy so I moved all documentation links to the new documentation page. Hopefully it's clear enough for new users and old users alike.

The list of things we've been thinking about doing for PyBlosxom is really long and contains items that have been fleshed out as well as items that haven't been fleshed out at all and are currently just looking for someone to do some more analysis. I'm going to take my notes and dump a bunch of "feature requests" in the feature tracker on the SourceForge section. The trackers are mildly crappy, but it's better than spending the time right now to build something on our own.

The plan right now is to let PyBlosxom 1.2 simmer a bit and shake out some of the issues it might have. Additionally, I'm going to try to spend some more time on fleshing out the manual and fixing up the contributed plugins that I either wrote or had a hand in writing.

We've got some ideas about what the next version will entail, but nothing is set in stone. It's likely we'll know more in a month.

And lastly, Planet PyBlosxom is no more. I had the domain name for a year and ran the site, but then decided I didn't want to run it any more. At some point, I'll set up something on here, but it's low-ish on my todo list at the moment.

I think that about covers it for this status update.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Sun, 27 Mar 2005

Contributed plugins 1.2 released

This contributed plugins pack contains a bunch of plugins and scripts that should work with PyBlosxom 1.2. Use these plugins at your own risk.

Each plugin should have documentation at the top of the plugin file. Read that for installation instructions. If you find any bugs or have any problems, contact us at pyblosxom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net .

Download it here.