svnlogger v0.1

This one is for the Unix freaks (that includes me !).  Remember the textual “ChangeLog” files we used to see in a lot of open source softwares ? It used to have the list of changes made to the software along with revisions number, contributor’s name and timestamp. I always liked the format of a particular kind of ChangeLog which showed all the details in a compact manner without losing any, helps me keep track of ‘What’s new!’ in my next version of the software. Anyways, so how do I make it ? For those of you who have been thinking that they’re hand-written, you’re so wrong ! After all, how can you expect an open source freak to do something ‘manually’ when he can easily automate any task in his computer using cool scripts ?? Anyways, usually they have some kind of Version Tracking System like CVS, SVN or GIT. I happen to use SVN most of the time, actually always, and since I needed to maintain a ChangeLog as well, I found there was a nice command called “svn log” which would generate a textual log of all the commits along with all the information I needed to see. Well, everything was there, but not in a way I wanted it to be. ‘svn log’ is good enough for ‘grep’ but not so good in terms of direct readability. So I wrote this small shell script that is basically a wrapper around the svn log but it uses AWK to reformat the data in a way I like it !

Copy paste the code below into a file called ‘svnlogger.sh’ and then execute it like

> sh svnlogger.sh <path-to-svn-repo> <path-to-changelog>

Agate CMS

Agate CMS is my Free and Open Source Software which I have hosted up on sourceforge.net. Its a Content Management System, which means it lets you create your fully functional website in just a few clicks ! All you need to do is work out a template for your website and all the coding part, including user-registration/login, user-management, website content, forms, etc will be taken care by the CMS.

First, I want to tell you a little about why I started this project. I actually never thought of coding a CMS of my own from scratch. What I actually wanted to do is to change the core-architecture of the Pragyan CMS v2, which is developed by the members of the “Delta Force” (the Central Webteam of NIT Trichy), of which I’m a part of. Pragyan CMS has been contributed to by dozens of students from my college and so when I started going through that huge number of PHP files each having some 4 to 5 hundred lines of codes, I didnt felt like actually trying to understand those thousands of lines of codes which were written by a dozen webteam members, the result of which is a code with no fixed convention for “pretty printing”, with many bugs&unnecessary codes, and absence of any single person who knows every single line of the CMS. This is what I call a “loose” software, and it needs to be filled up with lots of patches to remove all the bugs. This is what which encouraged me to write a CMS myself, with strict organization of files and structured code. This took some time but it wasn’t that hard.Finally, when I was halfway through I started implementing new ideas for the core architecture which were very different than what was there in Pragyan CMS. Till that point, Agate CMS was very similar to Pragyan CMS, but after that point, its my own ideas which I implemented which I thought were better than Pragyan’s. Finally I ended up writing a working CMS with an entirely different architecture and new features. I won’t go to the technical details now.