darcness

"darcness" is the name of the new content engine I am writing for www.deepdarc.com. It is written in PHP. This is my first large PHP application, and so far I am quite satisfied with how it is turning out.

Its design is inspired by the simplicity of Wordpress and the power/flexibility of Postnuke. I had the following design goals:

  • Usability. I want it to be easy for everyone to use, including administrators.
  • Elegance. This is somewhat related to usability, but important enough to deserve it's own bullet point.
  • Security. Hardened against injection-type attacks. Only stores password hashes(with salt) in the database. I have a lot of other ideas as well (javascript challenge-response so as to not send passwords in the clear when logging in, etc)
  • Flexibility. Change out a few plug ins, tweak a few values, and you can set it up for a completely different type of website.
  • Commerce. I eventually want to be able to sell stuff directly using darcness.
  • Internationalization. Built-in support for multiple languages. (I just need translators...!)

I'm not sure if I will be open-sourcing darcness or not. It is certainly not ready for release at the moment. Unless I feel there is some sort of interest in it specifically, I will likely just use it for my own personal use, and perhaps let a few friends use it on their blogs as well. If you are interesting in using darcness, just leave a comment at the end of this page! While it isn't ready yet, such feedback will determine when it will be.

Features

  • Markdown Syntax
  • Modular component-oriented subsystems
  • Flexible group permissions (Replaced by next item)
  • Access Control Lists
  • XMPP Authentication, for quick logins without a password
  • Mark entire posts (or parts of posts) as "private" so that they can only be viewed by members of certain groups.
  • RSS/ATOM Feeds for both posts and comments
  • Internationalization support, with easy web-interface. (Add specific users to the translators group and let them translate it for you!)
  • Hit logging (with integrated browser) for usage statistics
  • Referrer logging (with automatic search query extraction) for seeing how people are getting to your site
  • Error logging for keeping track of things that go bump in the night. (Important security feature, because you don't want users seeing MySQL errors!)
  • Ban list for excluding IP's not yet done
  • Group Membership expiration dates for memberships which might expire at a specific date.
  • Site search capability. (With RSS feeds for individual queries!)
  • Update/Publish pinging for sites like Technorati, Ping-o-matic, etc.
  • Trackback pinging

Trackback from your own site.

15 Comments for “darcness”

  1. Mark Says:
    Saturday, November 5, 2005

    Does it feature database bloating like pretty much every other blog system out there? :-)

  2. Sean Roth Says:
    Saturday, November 12, 2005

    I would really like to have a copy of darcness. I'm in need of blog software and darcness looks sweet.

  3. Marco Ciampa Says:
    Monday, December 12, 2005

    If it will ever be published with a free/open source licence (GPL like), you have an italian translator... :-)

  4. Goran Jordanov Says:
    Friday, December 23, 2005

    Macedonian too... :D

  5. Nÿco Says:
    Tuesday, January 10, 2006

    I'd really love to have darcness released under a free/opensource licence like the GPL, because of these features : flexibility, XMPP, logging. Besides I can give a little help with the french translation.

  6. wawa Says:
    Tuesday, January 10, 2006

    Hello.

    i think it'd be interesting to test your soft. It seems intersting, you should release it under free license ;)

    thanks.

  7. darco* Says:
    Tuesday, January 10, 2006

    I guess that settles it. I'm not making any commitments to exact dates, but I'll go ahead and say that I will be releasing darcness at some point over the next few months. If you'd like to be kept up to speed, you can follow up on darcness announcements here.

  8. Sean Says:
    Tuesday, May 2, 2006

    Well im rather impressed with the Synfig sight and would like to be kept in the loop as to any future release as I would like to have a play with it too.

  9. darco* Says:
    Monday, June 26, 2006

    So, just to let people know, there are a lot of things I have to take into consideration before releasing the source code to darcness. I want to make sure that it is robust as possible when I release it, so that I have less of a headache in the future, security wise.

    I am also extraordinarily busy as of late. Just know that it is still my intention to open source this software.

  10. halr9000* Says:
    Tuesday, August 22, 2006

    Looks interesting. You now have an English translator! ;)

  11. Istvan Says:
    Sunday, August 12, 2007

    Hungarian too...

    I like it.

    ...i hope it will be the engine for my micro-business page

  12. Andre Says:
    Tuesday, March 18, 2008

    It would be cool if you could make UTF-8 the native format, so we don't get corrupted Latin or Chinese text.

  13. darco* Says:
    Friday, March 21, 2008

    UTF-8 is the native format for darcness. It just happened to not be the native format for MySQL... until my hosting company "upgraded" it. Then all of the sudden all of the UTF-8 characters I had got "gibberized". I haven't gotten around to cleaning up the mess yet.

  14. netra Says:
    Monday, May 12, 2008

    I will received a gratuite program of synfig animation 2D. Please is to Knew this aplication in design graphic and interior design.

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