Thoughts on Chyrp

I recently found out about Chyrp from a co-worker, who had been alpha-testing it for a while now. She took some time out of her busy work day to advocate its usage.

From Chyrp’s Homepage

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is powered by PHP and has very powerful theme and extension engines, so you can personalize it however you want. The code is well-documented, and it has a very strong structure that’s loosely based on the MVC design pattern.

Upon installing Chyrp onto the bur.st host, I found it to be scalable; quick to deploy; fast to navigate; functional; aesthetically appealing; and very quick - something that couldn’t be said about NB.

One oversight made by developers of Chyrp was that, by default, noone was able to access any pages (!). As it turned out, the default .htaccess file that shipped with Chyrp-2.0, or even the git-version, did not have global-read permissions. This basically prevented the www-data system group from accessing the file, and in turn, this prevented all WWW users from viewing anything on the site. The issue was easily resolved by a $ chmod +r .htacccess.