bTonga - 1st public release

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa onFri, 02 December 2005 12:56:16

I'm not so sure how smart this whole idea is, but I've just pushed up onto the site my 1st release of what I hope to be a useful learning experience.

For want of a better name, I'm calling my little bloggin tool bTonga ? and it's available for download over at the Downloads section of the website.

http://www.nomoa.com/index.php/articles/downloads/1066 

It is a Windows client for creating/composing Blog Entries, and at the moment it only works with the MoveableType API which our Nomoa/Xaraya Server somewhat supports (not that I'm fully versed in this.)

The main goals of the little app was that I wanted:

  1. 'Free', because I like the idea and I'm using Free server software (although I am paying for the machine and bandwidth, etc.)
  2. Supports a WYSIWYG entry screen (which partially works at the moment) - www.wbeditor.com supports this in their free version of 1.66 (no longer available for download)
  3. Supports MoveableType extensions (specifically Extended Text Entries and Keywords) [the other stuff doesn't make sense in the context of Xaraya at the moment so I don't care much for them, yet] www.wbloggar.com supports these features, but again it isn't WYSIWIG
  4. Supports Image inclusions. www.wbloggar.com supports this, but it isn't WYSIWIG.
  5.  Supports other Publication Types in Xaraya, no body does this, yet.

See how far we've gone ? [Editor Category is @ http://www.nomoa.com/index.php/news/c34/ ]

Visit bTonga



For new users to the tool, the 1st thing to do (you can ignore this of course and hopefully the experience wont be soo bad) is to create an account setting.

During the account creation (i.e. typing in your host server etc.) you need to press "Login" for the Accounts portion of the program to validate with your server. After "login" please click "save" to ensure settings are retained between restarts of the program.

Now, in Xaraya, when you "Login" there are a number of blog apis that are not fully implemented, so the program will put up dialogs complaining about things not being implemented. I'll clean that up at a later stage, but it is very useful at the moment for debugging purposes.

I'm looking at releasing this thing as a BSD License, but need to track down some of the icons I'm using (i can't remember when/where I got them, but most are not original so they came from somewhere else.)

More information on this later, oooops and source code.

The Installer

I've built the installer using VC#Express 1.0's Publish facility so I have no idea whether it's gonna work elsewhere, but here's fingers crossed.

Requirements

Dot Net Framework 2.0

[Editor: Update @ http://www.nomoa.com/index.php/news/bTonga_-_Progress_is_as_Progress_do_0.5.1.4 ]