So work has finally resumed on PycoBlogs and currently I'm still mostly in the planning stages for what to do with this thing.
I have a pretty good idea the type of features I want but I need to make sure I program them properly so that everything is as functional and flexible as I need. I don't want to be on my 3rd rewrite of this system in a year.
Right now I have suddenly made the decision to switch how I program my SQL queries. Long story short, I have to learn a slightly different way of coding but the end result will be a slight increase in security! For those of you familiar with this sort of thing, I'm switching from MySQLi to PDO.
I'll probably eventually switch all my sites over to PDO just for the sake of simplicity, the main issue is that a lot of shared hosting plans don't have mysqlnd enabled, which makes it stupidly hard to use prepared statements in MySQLi.
My current host (Bluehost) is apparently amoung those, even though my PHP info says mysqlnd is there and I'm running on PHP 5.6 which should have it enabled by default. I might upgrade my hosting plan in the near future though, which could give me access to mysqlnd. Either way, despite being slightly slower a lot of people say PDO is a better choice than MySQLi so I figure it won't hurt to try it out in PycoBlogs.
Outside of the SQL stuff, I've already added the basic functionality of tags to the blog system so that you can find related blogs easily. I've also been messing around with the layout of the page slightly but that's the part I'm having the most trouble planning out. I want the layout system of PycoBlogs to be both simple and very customizable. I'm thinking a combination of a bccode style layout that you then style with CSS.
It's not as powerful as giving people direct control over the HTML but I've never really intended for PycoBlogs to compete with tools such as Wordpress so I don't see that as an issue. When it comes to Pyco, I make something I want to use and if I'm lucky other people might want to use it too. I'm my number one customer =p