Jason Clark created the moreentries plugin for Blosxom to allow adding links to the previous and next group of articles/entries in the head or foot of a Blosxom weblog. He solved a problem that most weblogs have; it can be difficult for visitors to browse older articles. Although he calls the solution a hack, he nicely solved an important problem.

I had been using the morentries plugin but found the text links didn't make it obvious to some visitors that there were more pages of entries. So I added images to the links to make them stand out. But I decided it might be more intuitive to use the same model used by search sites; create a graphical and textual link for each page of articles along with previous and next links.

So I decided to modify Jason's plugin to provide this feature. If you take a look at the bottom of my home page (or click on any link on the navigate page with more than 10 entries and scroll to the bottom) you'll see grey dots, arrows, and page numbers each linking to a page of articles.

You can download the modified plugin here. The prolog of the file describes the configuration options. I've included the public domain icons I use on my site in the zip file for your experimentation. Since there are a few configuration options I've put some examples below so you can see how the new parameters control the html stored in $moreentries::pagelinks.

With these settings:

$numpagelinks = 10;
$textlinks = 1;		# set to 1 to enable text links 0 to disable
$imagelinks = 0;	# set to 1 to enable image links 0 to disable

A screenshot of the HTML generated when the fifth page is selected:

With these settings:

$numpagelinks = 10;
$textlinks = 0;		# set to 1 to enable text links 0 to disable
$imagelinks = 1;	# set to 1 to enable image links 0 to disable

$prevlinkimage = "/images/left.gif";
$nextlinkimage = "/images/right.gif";
$currentpageimage = "/images/ball.red.gif";
@pageimages = qw( /images/ball.gray.gif );

A screenshot of the HTML generated when the fifth page is selected:

With these settings:

$numpagelinks = 10;
$textlinks = 1;		# set to 1 to enable text links 0 to disable
$imagelinks = 1;	# set to 1 to enable image links 0 to disable

$prevlinkimage = "/images/left.gif";
$nextlinkimage = "/images/right.gif";
$currentpageimage = "/images/text.gif";
@pageimages = qw( /images/ball.gray.gif /images/ball.red.gif );

A screenshot of the HTML generated when the fifth page is selected:

Thanks again to Jason for creating this plugin. It was fun to modify and I hope it is useful for other Blosxom webloggers.