I've updated my blog!

...and I don't mean by writing this post. ;)

I run Kirsle.net on a custom Python CMS I wrote called Rophako and I just added a bunch of improvements to the blog platform in it.

I've been wanting to start working on some larger blog articles, things that could take me a few days to write, and my blog had no support for saving drafts. You had to write and publish your blog posts in one sitting. The only alternative was to make the posts "private," where only the site admin(s) can see them, but that would still cause them to "go live" and be listed along with normal public posts and was a messy workaround.

So now my blogging platform has proper support for saving drafts; they stay invisible (even for admins) on all of the normal blog pages, and can only be seen in bulk on a dedicated "drafts" page. While I was putting all that together, I added similar support for private posts, giving them their own index too where you can see only those posts rather than have to go hunting for them.

For visibility purposes, draft and private posts get little tags next to their author/date lines so an admin can tell at a glance what they're looking at. Normal end users won't see those, though. ;)

I've also finally implemented a feature I wanted to from the beginning: sticky posts. The blog database schema has always had a "sticky" field, but it was always set to false and the Create/Edit Post page gave no way to change that value. The back-end code did have logic to bucket sticky posts higher on the index list than normal ones, but there was no (easy) way to make a post sticky to begin with.

Sticky posts will also get a little "[Sticky]" tag next to their author/date lines, and those ones can be seen by normal end users.

I also fixed a handful of smaller bugs/problems. I've removed the ability to set a custom date/time when editing a blog post. This caused confusion between your web browser's local time and the time zone of the server. So instead, the server always picks the latest UTC Unix time on new entries. When editing an existing entry, there's a checkbox option to reset the time to latest when saving, if you want to bump an old post to the top.