Since the development of JBlogs (now BalfBlog) back in August 2014 began, I have worked tirelessly on making my blogging system flexible for everyone. It matters to me not that it may never get that many users because by developing this I am developing my own skills whilst developing an excellent blogging system I can use on my other websites and future websites without any hassle.
Developing BalfBlog has become so easy, especially due to its MVC design pattern that I have adopted into it. But the development of BalfBlog has not been easy from the start. In fact, when BalfBlog started its core aim was to integrate completely with any website. The way it worked was to integrate both the front end and the backend (or dashboard as it is now known) into any website. Unfortunately, this was a huge job for anyone non-technical to setup and it was too much for me to develop further without any real reason.
After talking with some potential users I got a lot of feedback stating they liked the fact that the front integrates well with any website, but if the backend was complex to develop then they'd rather that the backend was easy to use and if that meant sacrificing integration with the website for a backend then so be it. I followed this feedback and decided to move to my own custom designed Dashboard. This is the Dashboard you can see now if you have trialled or used BalfBlog.
The development of this new Dashboard allowed me to redesign the whole of the BalfBlog backend to sit comfortably on the object-oriented balfblog.php file that manages all of the main operations of BalfBlog. The redesign also allowed me to develop the backend in a semi-MVC model, which makes the development of BalfBlog so easy.
However, the purpose of this post is not to talk too much about what makes BalfBlog amazing, but it's to ask what more you'd like to see in a blog. This year, particularly the last two months and this month, there have been a huge number of very useful features come to BalfBlog 2.2 (version Klebb, after Rosa Klebb) that have made BalfBlog exceptionally powerful and useful. The majority of those have focused on the social side of things like integration of OneSignal's API, allowing us to utilise push notifications and social buttons on each post, allowing users to quickly share a post. Unfortunately, I am beginning to run out of ideas for features for BalfBlog. I am looking to my users and readers again for more ideas! Test out my demo version here and let me know what you think by using the contact form on my website.
I will be holding BalfBlog development until the new year, I hope that by then I will have a good idea as to some new features people want to see in the next version. Also, I'd like to know, should I upload BalfBlog to GitHub soon?
