Geeklog Forums

Hey all

Just wanted to guage the interest in maybe putting together a bounty for a User Blog plugin to be developed. The developer could probably offer this as a premium plugin too.

I realise theres an old journal plugin and upage but these would both need updating.

Any thoughts on this?

Regards

Dazzy

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Dazzy

Somthing along these line is what I had in mind,

User Blog Plugin Features

1. Individual user blogs conform to Geeklog’s User Permissions, therefore admins can restrict who has blogs etc. This would also allow users to have private or public blogs/blog entries
2. Templates stored in theme directory for easier themeing and use the standard plugin css in style.css
3. Make use of Geeklog’s comment, trackback and ping back API’s, should respect config.php if trackback and ping back are disabled and like stories have option to turn on/off for each entry
4. Direct link from user profiles to their blog page, user blog entries should be displayed in user profile if blog is public
5. Should allow FCKeditor to be used and respect setting in config.php
6. Support Auto tags
7. Built in support for the Rating Plugin
8. Like MG and Forum plugins recently, allow to be used as Geeklog’s homepage
9. Entry added to What’s New block / Separate New Blogs Block function
10. Option to specify when blog is posted, just like stories
11. RSS feeds
12. SpamX and CAPCTHA support
13. Categorising of blogs into different groups
14. Ability to subscribe to blogs to be notified of new entries etc
15. Uses geeklogs search engine

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Dazzy

Dazzy, just a random thought on this as I read your list as it sounded very much like the features in GL topics and stories - since that was GL initial design requirement to be a blog. What if you created topics for each member and named the topics likeDazzy's Blog. Make the blog owner the topic owner with story-editor permissions. They still can only edit stories in their own topics so it's not like they have story edit rights over each others topics.

Featured stories on the frontpage would be just the stories users marked as show on frontpage and no one should use the featured-story option.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

I use this way on a current site to allow site sponsors to post news without it being moderated within their specified topic. And even give a very small number of users their own staticpages.

Is it possible say to only include certain topics in the topics block and contain the user ones in another block? as I would still want news topics, I know I could display news in staticpages either but that would become a nightmare after a while.

I know the list is similar to the current features of topics/stories and thats a testiment to geeklogs design, which should make writing a plugin easier. Something about giving user blogs that way doesnt feel right imho.

I know in the meantime I could use that technique easily up to a point, but a dedicated plugin would be good for geeklog in general.

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Dazzy

There is no present way to have the native section_block only show some topics and not others. You could do this with glMenu. I used to have a feature which is presently disabled which will use the sortorder field to only show topics <= xx. This way the default topics that you want are shown and the blog topics could be placed in their own block using a quick lib-custom block function to show topics > xxx

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

This is the one Geeklog really doesn't do. Neither topics nor themes aren't fully realized enough to allow stuff like topic-based themes. Personally I'd like to see themes turned into managed objects that you could attach to topics. But right now, themes are just a bunch of files and that's all Geeklog knows about them.

As long as I can fit it in with multiple themes on one site thats all I will really need, hence having templates in theme directory, like the forum does.

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Dazzy

Dazzy, did you notice that you can change the theme with the topic? http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=39655

In a similar way you could change the css with the topic and possibly already change a lot of the appearance. So every co-blogger would have own colours and could also have an own header image etc.

Thanks didnt see this but have decided to use a different system for the site I needed this for, in the end there were just to many custom things I needed to use Geeklog and timeframe I have set to get the site up would have been impossible for them all to be developed.

But if ppl think a User Blog plugin and subscription plugins for Geeklog are useful I will still contribute towards a bounty.

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Dazzy

I would personally be willing to pay for a premium plugin if this is developed well integrated into GL's core. Like what Blaine says, I do believe it can be done without reinventing the wheel but by enhancing the current topics & user.edit design.

I think the idea is registered users are able to have bookmarkable blogs of their own.
e.g. www.geeklog.net/nicholas
which he/she can share with public and edit with all the FCKeditor & tabbed publishing GUI features like the GL admin. Themes are secondary importance in my personal opinion.

Analogous concept to this is Mark's Media Gallery which I really appreciate. Every registered user has an option of creating/deleting his/her own album as and when he/she wishes. The only thing lacking in Mark's MG is that the members' personal album is not a personalised URL with the members' name.

However, the logged-in users stories are all also displayed at www.geeklog.net like the present system.

I personally think this would be a cool feature that will enhance GL's interactivity as a CMS. Appreciate the thought whoever raised this up.

I don`t want to argue against all this I just want to point out the one or the other aspect which you can solve already now:

If you have a list or drop down menu of blogs / user galleries on the front page maybe in the left column. This list could link to the specific blog or gallery with a "non nice URL". Like "Friend A" -> index.php?topic=friendA

Several other aspects of Dazzy`s list are already possible too. E.g. #14. You can subscribe to a topic and being emailed the latest stories and there is also an rss feed.

Dazzy`s list is very specific for multi blog blogging rahter like a commercial blog platform.

My main objective when posting that was blogs to be seperate to topics and stories,

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Dazzy

Hm, after reading this again I only find 1 main aspect that is indeed missing: "There is no present way to have the native section_block only show some topics and not others."

So what you mainly need is a number of blocks listing either blog entries according to a topic or news? That would require a field with the story to be listed in the 'newsA' or 'motor-cycle1' block etc.

Maybe this would be a smaller task? :kickcan:

BTW here is an example of a changing header pic:
http://www.montessori-schule-wertingen.de/public_html/index.php

Before I forget it, this will be the next task I suppose :wink:
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=71339

The problem is the word topic. A user's blog is not a topic. Having urls where one is a list of stories related by topic and another related by author using the same format is weird: www.example.com/index.php?topic=Computers versus www.example.com/index.php?topic=JohnDoe. Similarly, a blogger's "article" should be able to categorize itself with the topics as well. (or actually, should have a user created set of topics but that really wouldn't work in GL.)

I see, but I don`t agree. Drupal always uses the word 'node'. http://drupal.org/node/21947 You have no idea where you are if you look at the browser url. I think it is not weird but consequent. :wink: From that Drupal site: "Note: A common question is "What is the difference between page and story?" The answer is not much. There was more difference originally but they are merely different node types now and how you use them is up to you."

I quite like the idea of having just topics and stories and 'tagging' them to be displayed as 'blog' posting or 'news story' each group with its own CSS or theme.

That would be great if there were per topic themes and such.

And while everything is a node is an excellent way to make a CMS. Geeklog doesn't work that way and it never will. That said, everything is a node is not a panacea either. There are advantages and drawbacks to both models.

Yes, absolutely right, both ways got pros and cons! Sure we should not call it 'node' that would be a copy. But what about 'knot'? I rather meant to see the word "topic" in a different light.

Another idea concerning the optical separation of various 'stories' into news and blog postings would be to use different storytext.thtml files like blog_storytext.thtml news_storytext.thtml etc. It would be much easier to do that then use a whole different theme or CSS file.

This feature would be good anyway especially if a site becomes bigger and you have some sort of subdirectories and you definitely want them to look different.

Hey

That's not what I had in mind when I posted this.

Basically I wanted a seperate plugin so user blogs were totally seperate to topics as they won't be displayed on the main page of the site, but in a users profile, which has been made alot easier thanks to changes Blaine has made to the api.

User profile pages in geeklog are so under used, by allowing the use of navbar tabs on the user profile page and additional pages pulled in there from plugins users effectively have a 'homepage'.

The next evolution of our MC club site is to introduce social networking features into Geeklog, if users could theme these pages then great but this is not an immediate concern for me.

Me, JM and Blaine have been discussing this for some time, and although my immediate need for this has vanished it is something I will still want at some stage next year. The first stage of this is a plugin which will be developed early next year to allow additional fields to be placed in the profile.

Nicholas please/email pm me so we can see if our ideas are similar and maybe we could come up with some arrangement.

Regards

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Dazzy

Dazzy is something new?