Perl to the rescue…

So it appears there are some drawbacks in WordPress Mu. Mainly that there is a complete lack of a decent content aggregation plugin for it. Well that’s no problem, I’ll just write one…. wait just one minute. Perhaps the reason that their isn’t one already is because Mu is basically a giant hack!

There is an ugly bit of PHP that basically sets the current blog and then everything works, however changing the current blog breaks pretty much everything. Also Mu creates a set of tables for every blog, so all the posts are in different tables. Thus making writing a nice clean Mu plugin to aggregate the posts an impossibility.

So Perl it is then. A quick script to union the tables, TT the data and then print the output. Add a bit of caching and hey presto, done in less than an hour.

Still could use a bit of tidying up in the templates but other than that it’s all good. Anyway it’s running the per.ly homepage now. Also if anyone wants a per.ly blog, to post about anything related to Perl leave a comment.