/home/rafl

Until a few days ago my website was driven by PodCMS, which allowed me to manage all of the content as directories and files containing Pod (Plain Old Documentation). Unfortunately that wasn't quite flexible enough and didn't allow some features, like comments, tags and trackbacks, to be implemented easily. Also Pod sucks for some sort of content, as there's no satisfying Pod2Html module on CPAN as it seems.

Therefor I decided to create something new. The new system has all features the old one had, but now allows to create content in lots of formats such as:

• Pod
• Markdown
• Sbc
• Textile
• HTML

Other markup formats are possible as well, as the API for the formatting plugins is quite easy and usually just a thin wrapper around a CPAN module which does the actual translation to HTML.

Beside allowing new formats to write the content in, it also adds the following features:

• Comments
• Tags
• RSS feeds for comments and tags
• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• MoveableType API
• Manage static pages in an easy, tree-like fashion
• An easy web interface for editing everything. No need to work with files and directories anymore.
• Uses a relational database and is portable between many of them through DBIx::Class (I developed it using SQLite and deployed it on PostgreSQL)

In conclusion I'm pretty happy with the new software. I'm just very disappointed by quality of the generated HTML that the various Pod2HTML modules on CPAN produce, so I'll probably end up in writing something myself, based on Pod::Parser.

PS: The URL to rss feed changed. Please use http://perldition.org/blog.rss.