Flashblog is an open source php/Flash Content Management System geared towards blogging, though it could be used for any simple Flash website. The admin interface is done in PHP while the entire front-end is Flash.

The web interface is very simple to modify. There is a single Flash file that contains all the assets needed. Customizing the site is fairly simple as well--as long as you're familar with Flash, it's just a matter of drawing and moving things around where you'd like to place them. No HTML coding needed.

There are a couple downsides--for one, it's all in Spanish--unless you speak some Spanish it might be a little difficult to get installed the first time around. The second is that it's been quite some time since the site was updated, indiciating that development has, in all likelyhood, stopped--at least for now.

One of the most compelling things about Flashblog is that it could be used as a template for any Flash/PHP website. You have the .fla, the ActionScript and PHP all there for you--once you're able to understand that code, you're well on your way to creating your own customized content management system.

While it's definitely a shame that it's not under active development, it's a great open source project that is being used on several live websites.

Tonight I discovered the name for what I like so much here: Projectionist. It's a Tumblelog. As I predicted on Best Tool For the Job (my personal blog), I bet this trend will go crazy soon. Very cool.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm facinated with Ruby on Rails¹, and cautiously facinated with AJAX² and what it could mean for the web. Typo is weblog software (like Wordpress or Movable Type) that is written in Ruby on Rails and makes use of AJAX where it makes sense.

I installed Typo on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 under Apache using Plesk³ as a virtual host manager. Installing wasn't exactly easy, but the hard part wasn't Typo, it was getting Rails to work with Apache. Fortunately there are some great tutorials on Soapbox Confessional geared towards the exact environment I'm on.

Once Rails was installed, getting Typo to work was simply a matter of pointing it at the database and browsing to the page. Set up was a breeze and the admin interface is excellent. Some of the nice features in Typo are:

• Excellent spam protection by default.
• Drag and drop items from the list of available items to the sidebar in the admin interface. This works really well and is fun :)
• Very simple admin interface that only takes a second to get used to
• All the basic blog features - entries, pages, comments, trackbacks, feeds, categories, tags etc.
• Live search - this works really well also. Users can quickly search content without ever having to "submit" anything.

The developer community is very new, but active. With all the hype surrounding Rails, there are dozens of blogs already using Typo and pushing it forward quickly. I've used Wordpress and Movable Type extensively and the only major thing that I have found to be missing is an easy interface for uploading and managing images. Wordpress and Movable Type don't necessarily do this well, but they do provide some means of managing images.

Typo is free, open source and I'd recommend it to anyone who can run Ruby on Rails on their hosting and is willing to use newer software lacking in a few features, but moving forward quickly to add features no other blog software currently has.

¹ Ruby on Rails is a framework used to create web applications. Ruby is the programming language, Rails is the framework.

² AJAX is a JavaScript technology that allows data to be submitted asynchronously from webpages. Essentially you can submit data to the server without having to refresh the whole page.

³ Plesk is server side software to manage web clients and their domains. It's pretty good--I will do a review on it later.