Shinobi: Getting Started

Shinobi Blog Engine is the lightest web software that allows to create websites or blogs for minutes, not more. You have just to put files into a directory of your server, enter URL in the browser and start to work.

Shinobi is the smallest blog engine

This blog uses Shinobi blog engine as a program base. The 1^st closed beta version of the engine has been released at 24 September 2009; Shinobi has been released at 5 September 2010.

Shinobi’s weight is about 100 Kbytes as a kernel file or about 140 Kbytes with language file, CSS and configuration files, favicon and text editor; with the documentation about 215 Kbytes. ZIPped files are about 65 Kbytes.

The main feature of Shinobi is that it needs the single file to work correctly: it is a kernel file; or two for protected mode. The rest are optional or created by engine.

Here are the functionality of Shinobi:

— usual things of blog engines (authorization, creating, editing, removing and output of notes and comments, pausing discussions and premoderated comments, listing recent comments, setting available tags in comments, paginated output of notes, text search, date and topic search, simple editing of topics, hidden notes, prohibition of comments, RSS, attachments, Ctrl+Enter to publish notes, alternative URLs for notes, quick tags, careful processing of program code in notes);

— possibility to keep the blog hidden, allowed to read just for its administrator;

— possibility to keep the whole site hidden;

— optional multiuser mode with possibilities to set default privileges and every user privileges, with optional external user registration and atribution of pages and notes;

— administrative options are the parts of the system: after you login you have more possibilities;

— drafts (you can move notes from drafts to the main part and back anytime);

— security: proceeding user and stored data;

— protection of users: included functionality to protect of a harmful code, captcha, nofollow/noindex;

— operations with usual text pages; every page can be set as the main page of the site;

— dynamical pages (plug-ins) and editing those through the web interface;

— optional comments for pages and plug-ins;

— special page to send emails for the administrator;

— prefernces for the blog and the website, including password changing;

— dynamical menu creation;

— editing layout templates, creating additional areas;;

— SEO: editing keywords and descriptions for search engines in every page or note, prohibiting to index some links; "robots.txt" file is created and edited by the engine;

— file manager;

— downloads functionality;

— multilingual interface: small text dictionary file is used for every language; deffault language is English, but there is the Russian language in the basic set as well; the language of the text editor depends on the selected language;

— 404 page edited;

— plugins;

— all addresses and file paths may be changed in the administrative interface, excepting core file, .htaccess, preferences file and reset file;

— built-in documentation.

Pleasant little features:

— high speed;

— no database required;

— text parser uses P tag instead of BR when you input texts, but correctly proceeds empty lines and other tags;

— you can install Shinobi not only to the root directory of your server;

— customization of file paths and page extension in URLs: you can use .htm, or .php, or .aspx, .cfm, .pl, .jsp, or even .love, .ext, or without any extension.

Text editor uses light javascript framework Erumpu, but you can use any other editors.

System requirements

PHP 4 or 5 (or 6 beta) installed, optionally Apache web server (any version) and optionally .htaccess editing possibility.

Who is it?

The developer is Kirill “Erlang” Panfilov.