gitblog

A git-based blog/cms platform for PHP, meant as a replacement for Wordpress.

Post-action hooks in git are used to manage an intermediate cache which consist only of structured data (no formatting), allowing dynamic presentation. This is one of the biggest differences tech-wise in comparison to Jekyll and similar tools.

Licensed under MIT means free to use for everyone. See LICENSE for more information.

Features

• Fully git-based -- no mysql or similar involved
• Everything is versioned
• Themes
• No custom file formats for content (only JSON, Markdown (with Markdown extra) and HTML)
• High performance
• Hierarchical comments with optional spam filtering based on Akismet
• Remote editing (git push/pull)
• Wordpress import
• Plugins

(See section "Future features" for a list of possible future features)

Installing & Getting started

Clone a copy of gitblog:

$ cd /path/to/my-blog
$ git clone git://github.com/rsms/gitblog.git

If your web server is not running as yourself, your group, or the root user, you need to change owner. In this example www-data is the web server user. (You will still be able to edit the blog.)

$ chmod -R g+w .
$ sudo chown -R www-data .

Open a web browser and point it to your /my-blog/gitblog. Enter email and your real name -- these will be used for commit messages. Also choose a good pass phrase which in combination with your email will grant you administration privileges in the web administration interface.

When you're done you should see a single "Hello world" post. Okay, all good.

What did just happen? Gitblog initialized a git repository in /path/to/my-blog and added a few standard files and directories. If you ever would like to start over, just delete everything except the gitblog directory and visit /my-blog/gitblog in a browser again.

Let's try editing the hello world post:

$ $EDITOR content/posts/*/*-*-hello-world.html

Make some changes, be creative!

To demonstrate that the "working tree" is indeed a working area and not the live stage, reload your web browser and see that the "Hello world" post is still not modified.

Tip: You can view your work in progress by being signed in and appending ?preview to the url.

Now, let's commit the changes, pusing them live:

$ git commit -m 'Updated my awesome hello-world post' content

Reload your web browser and... voila!

Warnings when committing? If you see error: Could not access 'HEAD@{1}' on stderr when committing, do not worry. This is an issue that currently do not affect gitblog, but we're looking into what causes it.

Importing a Wordpress blog

If you have a Wordpress blog you would like to import, there is a built-in tool which does it for you! Just visit /my-blog/gitblog/admin/import-wordpress.php and follow the simple instructions.

Documentation

The docs directory contains a number of documents covering different parts of Gitblog.

Requirements

• PHP 5.2 or newer (only standard modules are needed though)
• Git 1.6 or newer
• POSIX system

Further play

The gb-config.php file (present in your site root) contains site-specific configuration. A default gb-config.php file, as it looks just after a blog has been setup, contains only the minimum set of paramters. There are a bunch of other paramters which might do something you whish.

Have a look in the file gitblog/gitblog.php -- scroll down a few lines and you'll find a class called gb which houses documentation and a list of all available configuration parameters, as well as their default values.

Known bugs and issues

• Post-hook system is a bit shaky because of the nature of itself. Running scripts directly instead of POSTing to a URL would be better but many systems does not have CLI PHP or have another version than the web PHP.

Future features

Work in progress

• Web administration

Planned

• Pingback
• Search

Under consideration

• Configure what parts are versioned (e.g. disable versioning of comments)
• Alternate storage
• Caching (memcached, redis, etc)

Authors

• Rasmus Andersson <rasmus notion.se>

History

A strangely cold morning in june 2009 Mattias Arrelid pressed the "Yeah, upgrade Wordpress". What happened seconds later still brings me down sometimes... Every file on our server--removable by the web server--was deleted in an instant. Many years worth of photos, audio recordings and not to mention the 30+ web sites which disappeared into the void of an unrecoverable ext3 file system.

We swore to never again use Wordpress and to do backups.

As we all like Git--this pretty little creation of the open source community--the blog tool of our future was of course based on Git. But after giving a few days of research we had not found any tool that suited our taste. (The closest match was Jekyll, however we wanted something more flexible, like Word...euhm). So what the heck, after all we are software engineers so why not write something ourselves?

Gitblog was born.