NAME
    Bryar - A modular, extensible weblog tool

SYNOPSIS
            Bryar->go();

DESCRIPTION
    Bryar is a piece of blog production software, similar in style to (but
    considerably more complex than) Rael Dornfest's "blosxom". The main
    difference is extensibility, in terms of data collection and output
    formatting. For instance, data can be acquired via DBD from a database,
    or from the filesystem, or from any other source you can think of;
    documents can be specified in HTML, or some other format which gets
    turned into HTML; pages can be rendered with Template Toolkit,
    HTML::Template, or any other template engine of your choice.

INSTALLING BRYAR
    The short answer: run bryar-newblog in a directory served by your web
    server. Then do what it tells you.

    The long answer:

    The only front-end working in this release is the CGI one; please don't
    try this in mod_perl yet. You'll need to write a little driver script
    which sets some parameters. For instance, my bryar.cgi looks like this:

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        use Bryar;
        Bryar->go(
             name => "Themes, Dreams and Crazy Schemes",
             description => "Simon Cozens' weblog",
             baseurl => "http://blog.simon-cozens.org/bryar.cgi"
        );

    You can get away without any configuration options, but it's probably
    wise to set something like the above up. Bryar will look in its current
    directory for data files and templates, so if you're keeping your data
    somewhere else, you'll want to set the datadir option too:

        use Bryar;
        Bryar->go( datadir => "/home/simon/blog" );

    If Bryar finds a file called bryar.conf in the data directory, (which as
    noted above, defaults to the current directory if not specified
    explicitly) then it'll parse that as a colon-separated file full of
    other options. I could, for instance, get away with

        name: Themes, Dreams and Crazy Schemes
        description: Simon Cozens' weblog
        baseurl: http://blog.simon-cozens.org/bryar.cgi

    in a bryar.conf, and then would be able to use "Bryar->go()" with no
    further parameters.

    For details of interesting parameters, look in Bryar::Config.

    Now you will need some templates to make your new blog look nice and
    shiny. You can copy in the template.rss and template.html which come
    with Bryar, and edit those. The bryar-newblog program which comes with
    Bryar will set all this up for you. Look at Bryar::Renderer::TT for
    hints as to how to customize the look-and-feel of the blog.

    Once you're all up and running, (and your web server knows about
    bryar.cgi) then you can start blogging! Just dump .txt files into your
    data directory. If you used bryar-newblog, you should even have a sample
    blog entry there for you.

USING BRYAR
    This section describes Bryar from the end-users point of view - that is,
    what do all those URLs do? If you're familiar with blosxom, this section
    should be a breeze.

        http://your.blog.com/

    will return the most recent 20 posts. The default of 20 can be changed
    by setting the "recent" configuration option.

        http://your.blog.com/something

    will try to find a sub-blog - in blosxom terms, this is a subdirectory
    underneath the main data directory. Sub-blogs can have their own
    templates, but by default inherit the templates from the main blog.

    (Oh, and another thing - you can stick templates either in the template
    subdirectory or the main directory for your blog/sub-blog. Bryar looks
    in both.)

    If you want your main blog to contain things from sub-blogs, you can
    change the value of the "depth" option, which defaults to one - no
    descent into subblogs.

    You can also export your blog as RSS:

        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/xml

    And combine subblogging with RSS:

        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/otherblog/xml

    Each blog post will have a unique ID; you can get to an individual post
    by specifying its ID:

        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/id_1234

    And finally you can retrieve blog entries for a specific period of time:

        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/2003/May/    # All entries in May
        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/2003/May/14/ # All entries on the 14th

    Of course, you can combine all these components:

        http://your.blog.com/bryar.cgi/otherblog/2003/May/xml

METHODS
    Now for the programmer's interface to Bryar.

  new
        $self->new(%params)

    Creates a new Bryar instance. You probably don't need to use this unless
    you're programming your blog to do clever stuff. Use "go" instead.

  go
        $self->go()
        Bryar->go(%params)

    Does all the work of producing the blog. For parameters you might be
    interested in setting, see "Bryar::Config".

  config
    Returns the Bryar::Config object for this blog. This is useful as the
    blog object is passed into the templates by default.

LICENSE
    This module is free software, and may be distributed under the same
    terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR
    Copyright (C) 2003, Simon Cozens "simon@kasei.com"