Sun Aug 19, 2007
Patching My Way To Happiness
In a move against the main stream, I have been making more and more modifications to the Textpattern core, instead of turning everything in to a plugin. Sometimes I cannot justify the performance hits and complexity of doing things the ââ¬Åproperââ¬? way.
My most recent (and IMHO most useful) adds the ability to restrict access to articles based upon a Textpattern friendly set of rules. These rules are defined through the admin interface. The rules can be as coarse as allowing any authenticated user to see an article, to only allowing users that match a specific set of privileges. My motivation for tinkering with the core is I really did not want to spend the time and effort towards building a complex set of plugins that rely upon PHP’s buffering commands and duplicating a majority of Textpattern’s libraries.
I made this specific change to allow myself the freedom to blog in a controlled fashion. I have previously been suffering through the options of I can either show no one, or everyone. I now will have a few more options and the most important part is that my work flow is unchanged and all the appropriate filtering happens automatically. To see this in action, check out the Personal section of my site.
I currently do not plan on releasing or supporting these changes. I may do so in the future after a few more versions, but there are still a few things that I need to iron out.
