Diving into MachBlog
I work with Model-Glue and Coldspring regularly but I have yet to take time to evaluate the Mach-II framework. After listening to Matt Woodward and Peter J. Farrell talk-up the MachBlog beta on CF Weekly I thought to myself MachBlog would be a golden opportunity to evaluate Mach-II. Not only that but since I've decide to start blogging in 2007 MachBlog will meet that need as well. So if you're not reading this post from your favorite feed aggregator then your looking at MachBlog (Beta 1 at the time of writing).
First impressions…So far I'm really impressed with MachBlog. Matt was kind enough to let me have read access to the Alpha code so I've got a bit of a jump start preping for the beta. Skinning is an especially nice feature. MachBlog comes with three skin choices but with very little effort you can create your own skin. I created my own skin based on an open-source design from openwebdesign.org. For a beta product MachBlog is suprisingly feature rich. Administration contains the usual suspects: Entry, Category, Comment, Trackback, Aggregator, User and Subscription admin. I have yet to find myself in the Db tweaking data.
What's missing IMO…No XMLRPC support (yet). Matt mentioned in an email that XMLRPC support is in the future plans.
MachBlog is billed as a reference application for the use of Mach-II and ColdSpring. Matt and Peter have accomplished that and a lot more. If learning Mach-II, ColdSpring or OO techniques is on your radar MachBlog is an excellent place to start.
I'm excited to learn a ton about Mach-II from this app!
