Matilda is a project of mine that came about from the growing reality that I needed a blogging engine that could adapt and grow to my needs, and in turn use as a teaching tool to develop more manageable solutions.
I'd used Wordpress before for about 3 years, and to a point was happy with the experience but had little control over what I was getting, and whether each upgrade would install ok against the multitude of plugins I needed to have the features I wanted.
I started hunting for more options, Feather looked promising with the MERB engine but still left me with something that wasn't simple to effect and all-you-need solution.
With my previous engine Typo sucking up more server resources than a kid on an ice-cream binge it was finally a time to discover exactly how hard it'd be to build my own, which turned out to be not as hard as I first imagined; in fact it was and still is incredibly exhilarating.
What came out of all this is...
- Something that has every page cached, so it's faster to the user and a one-hitter on the database.
- Sweepers that cleanup when posts, pages, notes & links change; behind-the-scenes and automated so the Admin guy needn't worry.
- Automatic pinging to Google & Pingomatic when a new post is added to boost site traffic and keep google in the know.
- One-step integration to Twitter, Akismet and social bookmarking all embedded in the core without needing another plugin.
- Dynamic sidebars, tagging and multiple categories.
- 404 catchers to track holes in the site, especially when migrating to a new engine so those dead links in google don't infuriate future visitors to your site.
- Quick Notes and Quick Links so you can quickly record anything that crosses your mind before you forget it again.
- A simple Contact form, and all comments moderated & filtered with anti-spam Akismet, so only approved stuff ends up on your site.
- Lightning Fast Full-Text searching with Sphinx and UltraSphinx for quicker searches at little cost to your database engine.
- Prototype replaced by jQuery for quicker load times.
Ok, the entire thing took 3 months of my spare time but in terms of speed and usability it's really tight and such a strong learning tool ;-)
Source Githubbed here
Plus tutorials I've wrote that can help with you're own;
- Implementing RSS & ATOM Feeds
- Implementing Akismet
- Implementing Social Bookmarking
- Textile and MarkDown filtering
- Mongrel Clustering replaced with Thin
- Apache replaced with NGINX
photo courtesy of koller93
