We begin stage three on the .text-based community blog project I'm doing after-hours these days. It has been as satisfying (and educational) as I had anticipated, digging into ScottW's .Text 0.95 source for yet another project.
Other than a number of general customizations, the first stage was to link both blogger and commenter identities to an external SQL database source. A cookie-based lookup was added for commenters and the comment form is not shown until login. No complications there.
The second stage proved a bit more challenging in integrating 500+ shared categories to supplement and display separately from blogger personal categories. This is similar to my Series collection at dbvt.com/blog, but more involved. The shared categories for the project required a separate admin function to filter and select from the master list of 500+ items, availability from the admn add and edit post form, and the most interesting challenge being a cumulative display of categories and counts across all blogs on the aggregated home page, integrated display of all posts by master category made by all bloggers in the community, and full support for RSS by master category. Talking about getting deep, deep, deep into the .text source...
Now on tap for stage three is RSS support for enclosures (podcast format) and accompanying file upload support in the admin area. Then its a wrap for Christmas and I can start blogging about the cool technical issues involved in the project. I haven't posted technical information (as in C-O-D-E) for days and days, but the good news is that the reason I haven't been posting it is because I've been busy writing it.