Hello I am Nick and I made this thing. Newlife Blogger was a project I made many years ago as a hobby. A friend of mine wanted to offer blogging service to his online community, and asked me to setup something. I was going to just use livejournal as it is an open source project, but LJ is a huge system and I wasn't qualified to set it up and it would have been overkill anyway. So instead I made my own simple clone of Live Journal and we called it NewLife Blogger after the community my friend ran.

The project is no longer maintained, but it was my first big project and I was rather proud of it at the time. I had to deal with managing files, validating email addresses, banning unruly users, and letting people express themselves with custom themes. The software was used on a few other sites, the biggest was a gaming community that had about 3000 users.

The biggest outside library that I used was the ETS template system. While not the fastest template system it had some cool features that I needed. Also, I really liked its "mask" system. You could divide up the template into logical parts from the developers side and from the designers side. Also, I think I was the biggest project to use ETS, as the author of the library added some special features when he noticed that I had modified ETS to prevent users from executing PHP code within the templates.

Within the system I wrote several classes to handle core ideas in NLB, such as blogs, users, email, and database connections/queries. At the time I thought I was pretty hot because I was doing it OOP style. I didn't realize that I was basically writing models and following MVC in an unenforced way.

If you looking through the code and think that the techniques look like an amature, that is because I was at the time. Also, the code was written to work on PHP 4.x since this was way before version 5 came out.