Publish Press

Publish Press is a script which generates an HTML index page from an RSS feed. It reads simple templates and uses them to generate a file. Publish Press is what’s used to publish the home-page of the hello Show. It can take RSS feeds from almost any source, but is designed specifically to work with the Syndicator. It can also optionally apply SmartyPants formatting to the outputted HTML file with the addition of Michel Fortin’s PHP port of it, including variants such as Mikhail Wolfson’s addition of Unicode ligature support. Publish Press relies on Vojtech Semecky’s lastRSS parser to do its thing, and therefore is dependent on the feed you want to use being an RSS 2.0 feed.

Installation & Usage

1. Download.
2. Upload all the files to your server. Usually, you’ll want to place them in the same directory as your feed.rss file from the Syndicator, but it can be configured to be in a different place.
3. Create a file called index.html and set its permissions so that anybody can edit it. (Unix octal mode 666 minimum) Again, you can tweak the script to point to a different file if you want to.
4. If you want to run SmartyPants on your file, go grab a PHP SmartyPants-compatible port of it and drop it in the same folder as the script with the name smartypants.php
5. Tweak the configuration in publishpress.php to your fancy.
6. Go to publishpress.php and then to index.html in your web browser. All done!

Download

Publish Press 1.1, released 12/06/2010. ZIP file, 16KB.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is this better than a blog publishing system like Chyrp or Movable Type?

‘Better’ is a subjective term. For certain tasks, large publishing platforms are ideal. I run my blog on a Chyrp setup at the moment, for instance. But Publish Press is a highly secure, scalable and reliable system. It’s as reliable as sites were when they were hand-coded every page—mostly because that’s effectively how Publish Press works: generating flat files which, to the server, may as well have been written in BBEdit.

What about dynamically-parsed templates?

Coming soon to a Publish Press near you.

Static pages generated through the templates?

This is now available but very experimental, with several major known issues. These will be fixed in the next release. In the meantime, just use SHTML includes to reference the top.html and foot.html template files.

This is awesome.

Why, thank you.

I H8 U & UR PROGRAM IS ST00PID

Bug reports and comments can be sent via email.