Directories can now be displayed as a 'blog', which treats all file descendants of the directory as if they were blog entries and attempts to be somewhat intelligent about how much to show and how to navigate things, supporting navigation by page date or Nth to Mth most recent pages.

ChrisSiebenmann doesn't believe this makes BlogDir obsolete. BlogDir is an excellent view for ChangeLog style situations, which is exactly what NewFeatures uses it for; however, it makes a bad way of displaying a true blog-style environment because of eventual information overload. BlogView is designed to deal with that by trimming what gets displayed and providing time-based and range-based navigation.

Because it looks at all descendants, you can use directory structure under a BlogView directory to create categorization, or simply to keep things from being totally overwhelming. (Don't name subdirectories with the prefix of a VirtualDirectory, though, or various bits of navigation will stop working.)

The operating structure is much the same as BlogDir: a new view, valid only on directories, a new renderer called blog::blog to do the heavy lifting (including deciding where to clip over-long pages), and a number of associated renderers to provide navigation and information.

Because you want to display changelog pages somewhat differently from blog pages, BlogView uses a new template to render pages: blog/blogitem.tmpl. (The name may be unfortunate and perhaps should be swapped with the BlogDir name.)

When it is cutting the number of items on a page off, blog::blog is careful to only cut on a day boundary; this keeps by-day navigation links working nicely, as you cannot use per-day navigation to jump to the middle of a day. Per-day views always show everything from that day, however large and voluminous. However, the Nth to Mth most recent view will gleefully cut things off halfway through a day if that's how it works out.

Navigation renderers make heavy use of VirtualDirs to specify dates or ranges of pages to show, making them the first time we actually generate such virtual directory links ourselves. Unfortunately most of the interesting new calendar-based renderers aren't usable outside of this view because they rely on having access to the big list of possible pages so they can grovel out date range information.

There's a variety of new time-of-entry renderers, some of which count on support from the main renderer to set up context variables for them.

(Clearly, renderer documentation is going to be a huge swamp.)