I just saw this on Twitter while doing a search for Croogo related news. It looks like Matt Curry has released a plugin that will migrate your Wordpress blog over to Croogo. I would give this a shot but I'm currently not running any Wordpress sites. This is great news for any CakePHP developer running a Wordpress blog looking to switch over to the CakePHP based Croogo.

Right now it looks like it migrates most data, but I would test it on a development server before you migrate your production blog.

Check out the plugin on Matt Curry's Github repo

Fahad, the lead developer followed through with his promise of delivering Croogo 1.2 before the end of the month. The new release packs a handful of new features that extend Croogo's functionality. A few of my favourites include the new hook and plugin system and custom helpers for themes.

I plan on upgrading this weekend to 1.2 and I'm excited to see what the future holds for the next release.

Read more on Fahad's blog

Wow, it's been about two weeks since my last post. I have been quite busy in the last month finishing up a custom social network that I developed in CakePHP.

Fahad the author of Croogo has added some great new functionality to Croogo especially when it comes to extending the system and creating your own plugins/hooks. I will be writing up some tutorials once the hook system is complete (hopefully in the next few days).

To test out the new plugin/hook system I developed a Tagcloud plugin with it's own admin panel that will allow you to add a tagcloud to your Croogo install. Check out the plugin page for more details and to download.

Croogo Tagcloud Plugin

Most popular blogging engines allow you to categorize your blog posts by month. This is a simple code snippet to achieve monthly archives in your Croogo installation. You can find the code and installation instructions in the link below. If you have any questions, comments or find a bug leave a comment on the code's page.

Croogo Monthly Archives

I got tired of hand writing slugs for my blog posts, I am used to using the acts_as_sluggable behavior. I thought about implementing the behavior into Croogo but realized this might be better implemented as some simple Javascript. Initially I wrote a simple find and replace function with Javascript that converted spaces to hyphens but realized it didn't take into account special characters or more than one space so I did a quick search on Google and came across the jQuery Slug Plugin. It took me about 2 minutes to download and implement.

All you need to do is download the plugin and place it into your webroot/js directory and then modify a few lines in app/views/nodes/admin_add.ctp. The changes I made are below.

$javascript->link(array('nodes', 'jquery.slug'), false);

Include the jQuery slug plugin at the top of the page.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#title").slug({
        slug:'permalink',
    });
});
</script>

Set up the plugin and let it know the title field's ID and the class of the slug field.

echo $form->input('title', array('id' => 'title'));
echo $form->input('slug', array('class' => 'permalink'));

Add an ID to the title field and a classname to the slug field. That's about it, hope this saves you some time when you are writing your next article.