From LifeType Wiki
Contents |
Key Features
The LifeType project prides itself in maintaining several important goals that make it stand out among all other weblogging solutions.
- Easy Installation
Installing web-based software had never been so easy. Let the installation script take care of configuring LifeType for you. Simply type in a few preferences (and one default user), and you'll be able to access all features of LifeType as soon as the installation script finishes. No more config file editing!
- Administrative Interface
LifeType is fully controlled via its administration interface: every single setting of LifeType is tweakable by browser. Don't bother about securing LifeType's config files, everything's stored within the database.
- Enhanced Security
IP address blocking and simple regular expression-based content filters. Block an ip or a range of ips in a few simple clicks. A fully-integrated Bayesian filter knocks out spammers and the like. Design your own filters as plugins and ensure your site's safety and integrity.
- Speed
LifeType was built with speed in mind, as it is meant to support many simultaneous users browsing dynamic pages. It has been optimized for performance several times during its development cycles and it is one of the fastest out there.
- Database storage system
Forget about clumsy rebuilds of your site every time you post a new article! Simply type out your thoughts, click "Blog this!" and in no time you will have your newly typed article included in the main page of your site. Talk about publishing for the masses!
- Media handling
LifeType has built-in media handling features to that users can easily upload and share their media items such as images and videos. Additionally, LifeType will generate automatic enclosures in RSS 2.0 feeds for those into podcasting.
- Page caching and support for HTTP conditional requests
If you're running a busy site and you're looking for a way to speed things and to save some bandwidth, this will probably be very helpful!
Customization
It is important in any project to allow customization by the end-user. LifeType makes this achievable by offering templates, plugins, and more.
- Portability
LifeType runs on any common web server and operating system platform which supports PHP 4.x and MySQL.
- Plugin Framework
LifeType offers an extremely plugin framework so that its features can be extended in many different ways without compromising the stability of the core. Plugins can appear in the administration interface, register new actions, be localied, and much more!
- Easy to modify template system
If you don't like any of the templates included in the package, worry not. LifeType is built on top of the fantastic Smarty template engine, providing unprecedented power to template developers without compromising security, since Smarty templates do not allow by default to add potentially dangerous PHP code to our templates. This is specially important if we use LifeType to provide a blogging service to a community of people.
Community-Rich Features
- Multiple Blogs per Installation
There is no need to install multiple copies of the same software to have different blogs! LifeType was built from the ground up to be able to support different blogs with just one single installation and one single database.
- Multiple Users per Blog
Not only can we have multiple journals running on one install, but we can easily give other users permissions to access our blog and let them post articles whenever they wish, making collaborative web sites even easier!
- User Levels
LifeType supports a simple yet powerful user levels system: either you own a blog, or you are just allowed to post articles in it. Being an owner, you control the settings and add and remove more users and templates if needed. Or perhaps you're a site administrator and can control the global settings?
- Full-Featured Commenting System
It's always nice to hear what people have to say about our musings, rants or bashings. In those cases when other people's opinions are wrong, simply delete (and blacklist) commenters or disable commenting altogether (definable on a per-article basis). If needed, enable email notification for when people post new comments to your articles.
Statistics and Related Information
- Traffic Statistics
Want to know where people are coming from when they reach your blog? Want to know where they go? LifeType includes a very basic referrer module that will show you all that information. Want more detailed statistics? Install the statistics plugin for full featured website statistics.
- Automatic Trackbacks
Let people know when you post about them! If the destination blog is trackback-enabled, LifeType will auto-discover everything for you (including the trackback URL) and send a trackback ping. It has never been so simple!
Accessibility
- Content Syndication
LifeType is capable of generating out of the box 3 different flavours of RSS: 0.90, 1.0 and 2.0. There is also a Klipfolio feed and a custom-defined XML feed. Don't like any of them? Don't worry, they all use templates that are easily modifiable to suit our needs. Additionally, LifeType comes bundled with an RSS aggregator so that you can easily include external sources of news in your website.
- Search engine friendly URLs
Toggle a setting in the configuration of the site and LifeType will automatically use cruft-free URLs instead of the old style, raw ones. Friendlier URLs are easier to remember, shorter to type and web-crawling engines will be able to index all your posts.
- Note: These kind of URLs are only available when using Apache 1.3.x.
- Web Standards Compliance
The default templates included in LifeType are XHTML 1.0 Strict and utilize valid CSS 2.0 stylesheets. The same may be said of any content generated by the LifeType backend.
- Blogger and metaWeblog-compatible XMLRPC API
If you like to publish right from your desktop, LifeType comes with an implementation of the Blogger and metaWeblog XMLRPC APIs. Now you can easily post text and pictures (media objects are supported when using the metaWeblog API!) to your blog. Clients like w.Bloggar, ecto or even Flickr have no problem in talking to LifeType.
- XMLRPC-Ping
Notification to configurable sites that support the protocol, such as weblogs.com, blo.gs or Technorati. How about letting the whole world know whenever you post something? You can do that by sending automatic XMLRPC pings to sites that support them. Easy. Simple. Fast.
