Barijaona announced today the release of the first English and French language Blosxom Starter Kit (there is a Japanese starter kit assembled by hail2u.net available here).

"I really like Blosxom," says Barijoana on his webpage, "but I noticed that its learning curve can be a bit frustrating. You get your first post in a few minutes; but to make your blog fit your exact needs, you will have to explore the web to find the useful plugins, configure and test each of them and change your page templates accordingly."

Barijaona's kit is available here. It includes many useful plugins:

blok, categories, date_fullname, debug/seeerror, entriescache, exclude, fix_static_url, flatarchives, flavourdir, foreshortened, interpolate_fancy, Markdown, meta, pagetype, prefs, prevnextstory, rss10, sort_by_name, sort_by_path, sort_reverse, staticfile, storytitle, wikieditish

He's also made some changes to some of the files:

I'd appreciate comments about the changes I have made to :
- blosxom.cgi (especially escaping of < > and & in xml feeds with non US-ascii content-types, change to the use of %file for better handling of static rendering)
- exclude plugin (complete rewrite)
- interpolate_fancy (fixed a bug that blocked the "recurse into story" feature in xml flavours)

Everything looks great, and he would love to hear some feed back via the Mailing List, especially from Windows users as the instructions seem geared towards *nix/MacOS X.