I've decided to call the blog software I'm writing "Grot Blog". It's a joke. The "grot" is British English for, roughly, junk. There used to be a show on the air in the U.S. called "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin". It was a British series, and part of the joke of which was that the title character, Reginald Perrin, opened a series of shops called "Grot", which sold useless junk. Fortunately or unfortunately for Reginald, the shops turned out to be a brilliant success, despite his attempts to sabotage them. I always thought it was a great joke.

• Objectives
• Easy to reconfigure
• Easy to "skin" or "theme"
• Generates "static" pages; no templating system
• Allows owners to upload their posts, without much vetting; no online editor-- use the one you like and upload the post
• Allows comments or not, depending on the post
• Filters input for security
• Avoids the use of RDBMS if possible, or minimal use otherwise
• Allows for addition of non-blog content, like "About" pages and such
• Generally follows MVC, but without a full framework
• Shows excerpts rather than full posts on any given page
• No front controller
• Directory Structure
• /config: for configuration type items
• /graphics: graphics
• /models: models
• /views: views
• /templates: more than one, configurable
• /libraries: misc code/classes
• /data: posts, comments, etc.
• What we want in the sidebar
• Months containing posts and how many
• Topics and how many posts for each
• Authors and how many posts for each
• Links to login/logout
• Link to administer everything, including adding a new post
• "Database" files
• config (ini file)
• data (EDI-style file)
• stats by month, number of posts
• stats by topic, number of posts
• stats by author, number of posts
• author,login, password, name, email
• post ID, timestamp (postid), author, topics, last_revision_timestamp, number_of_comments
• topic_code, topic_name
• Anatomy of data directory
• one directory for each post, named for the ID of the post
• post file
• author
• title
• topics
• excerpt file
• comments subdirectory
• comment files, named for ID of comment
• Pages needed
• add user
• delete user
• edit user
• show user
• list users
• add post
• delete post
• edit post
• show post
• list posts
• add topic
• delete topic
• edit topic
• show topic
• moderate comments
• add site nav category
• edit site nav category
• delete site nav category
• add site nav link
• edit site nav link
• delete site nav link
• show/edit config
• index.php to show current posts

This is one of the most detailed specs I've ever written for a project. And obviously, it's subject to change. The next issue is where to start coding.