Having spent a week on the Smarty mailing list I’ve learnt quite a lot about and and thought about how to use it. I knocked up a demo that uses a bunch of templates to build a Hype 0.2 style page. Nicely it takes about 30 lines of code (and a splash of HTML, obviously). It uses a frame template and a portal template as 0.2 does, they’re are pretty simple but they could be slightly cleaner. The left and right blocks of portlets are arrays so the theme designer has to know how to use a Smarty foreach.

I also wrote a lot of Perl. I wrote a one liner that converts text files to uber-simple, a one-liner that does sentence capitalisation and a many-liner that deduces the average hits to each page from a set of Apache logfiles. This showed me that Hype gets about 6,100 hits a month, which makes me happy.

Also for new-hype, I’ve been thinking about threads more. It occured to me that a public thread with only one author is a weblog, so I might integrate this with Hype, we’ll see. Also I like the aggregating up to the front page bit. I originally built Hype’s stupid thread support like it is because I thought that proper forum style threads would stop users posting to the front page and just reduce the amount of content. However, Hype’s post counts have stabilised, so I’m wondering if the opposite may be true: that other threads would just increase the amount of posting and the number of people doing it. A more general message server, rather than the flow-of-existence style of the front page.

Clearly threads are going to have to more central to a new version of the code, so I think I will tackle that task next, given that themes is more than 50% done (i.e. design and initial implementation).