CincomSmalltalkWiki: Silt

Silt is the name of the blog server in use on the Cincom Smalltalk blog site. It's also in use at MetaCase, James Robertson's personal blog, and probably other places I don't know about yet. Where does the name come from? It kind of goes with the aggregator name of BottomFeeder

James Robertson is the primary author, but there's been plenty of help from other people - Steve Kelly in particular.

Last Updated: November 9, 2010

Obtaining Silt

Silt consists of VisualWorks code and some external SSP files used by the Web Toolkit. You can obtain both parts either by installing from Store.

If you want to try the system out, here's what you do:

Load the Silt bundle from the public repository. When it prompts you to save files, select all and hit "ok"
To Create a new blog, use Tools>>Blog Manager, then the "New" button. All you need to add is an email address for the "maintainer" field.
You should now be able to access the blog via http://localhost:8008/blog/blogView
To login and adminster or post, use http://localhost:8008/blog/blogLogin

You can change the css references in View.ssp to use any of the CSS templates that come down with the installation; you could derive a new one based on them as well, using the same API that View.ssp uses. Alternatively, you can set things up any way you want using the API in class BlogSaver. For example:


blog := BlogSaver named: 'blog'.

"get all recent posts"
recentPosts := blog fetchAllRecentPosts.

"get all recent posts for a category"
recentInCategory := blog fetchBlogsbySearchCategory: someCategory

"get the most recent N posts in a category"
recentInCategory := blog fetchBlogs: howMany bySearchCategory: someCategory

"get a specific post by entry ID"
blogPost := blog entryFor: entryID

"get most recent post"
lastPost := blog blog fetchAllRecentPosts first.

To learn more about the API, look at class BlogSaver, specifically, the api categories

The server also manages "static" pages; you can create one using the administration pages. It will land in a directory named 'blog/content', where 'blog' is the name you used when you set the site up. If you edit the resulting file by hand, you'll need to tell the server that it's been changed (if you edit with the tools, it'll get handled for you). To reset by hand:


blog (Blog.BlogSaver named: 'blog') cache clearHTMLCaches.

Finally, if you want WYSIWYG online editing, you need to install TinyMCE. Download that here, and install it on your server. Edit the file editor.inc to reflect the proper location.

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