The cpan branch of Plerd’s GitHub repository holds the proposed version 1.7 source for Plerd. It’s more of an organizational change than a feature-based one, and as it’s driven in part by suggestions that I’ve received from other Plerd users, I would very much appreciate some comment about it.

The main difference it has from 1.6 involves dist-friendliness: it allows you to install Plerd at either a user- or system-wide level and invoke its programs from anywhere on your system. This will allow for me to package and distribute it in the style of other Unix software, without forcing the you-the-user to fuss over dependencies. (I plan to begin by getting Plerd onto CPAN.)

This version also tries to make launching new blogs with Plerd less of a prickly procedure, providing a new plerdall --init command that pops a blank blog directory into being, already populated with a config file and templates.

At this time, installing this branch involves following these steps:

1. Download the branch from GitHub, and unpack it (or clone the repository and then switch to its cpan branch)

2. While in the code’s directory, run cpanm --installdeps . just to make sure you have all of Plerd’s dependencies installed. (If you wish to install Plerd system-wide, instead run sudo cpanm --installdeps ..)

3. Run perl Makefile.PL; make; make install. (If you wish to install Plerd system-wide, make that last bit sudo make install instead.)

That should be it; you should now be able to navigate elsewhere on your system, run plerdall --init, and marvel to the appropriate degree as a plerd/ directory appears, full of goodies.

The idea, of course, is that once this is in CPAN or some other package manager, the one-step installation will involve something like typing cpanm Plerd and that’ll be that. But before I get there, I want to give other Plerd-using folks some time to chime in. Please consider this comment period open through Monday, October 15; you can post commentary either directly to me or to one of the mailing lists.

Thank you!