History of BlogsPackage

A Blog is a web based Journal or Diary.

Users may be allowed to create Blogs (either public or private) which can be accessed through this site or with the use of a desktop applications.

The blogs package, as one might expect enables users to post blog posts to a website. The blogs package has two main features - blog posts, and blogs.

What is a "Blog Post"?

A blog post by any other name is still a blog post. Like an article, a blog post is user created and owned content that includes Publish and Expire time stamps. Blog posts can be created to publish now, in the future, or even in the past. Posts automatically persist for all time, however the Expire time stamp can be used to make a blog post disappear in the future.

What is a "Blog"?

In the bitweaver BlogsPackage, a blog is a item which blog posts can be attached to. You can have several blogs on your website, and you can have several people be able to post to them. You can fine tune these relationships so that if you want, you can have one blog that only a few people can post to, and another blog that lots of people can post to. Or any number of blogs really. A user does not need to have a blog to be able to create a blog post. So you can have a general pool of recent blog posts and then specialty blogs which select authors post too - such a configuration is a common need of community blogging sites, and the bitweaver BlogsPackage is robust and flexible enough to configure the most complex community blogging sites imaginable.

Blog posts can be joined to Blogs both at authoring time, or later by an admin. This allows for the commonly desired feature of "promoting a blog post" to "the front page". In the case of this package you would use a blog to manage your front page posts, and any blog posts you want to appear there would be attached or "promoted" to that blog.

For a good live example of a complexly configured community blog site using this package please see: Workinglife.org

Features

• Ajax Read More
  The "Ajax Read More" feature lets readers load up the second half "read more" section of a blog post into a page that displays several posts at once. Thus the user does not need to do a full page load just to read the rest of the story. The Permalink and Comments links are still present if the user desires to navigate to either of those.
• Auto Display Primary Attachment
  Blog posts can automatically display any attachment, typically an image, that is marked as the "Primary Attachment" during editing. This is especially useful for automatically inserting a photograph into a post. The first image you upload and attach to a blog post, during blog post editing, is the Primary Attachment. If you upload more images you can select which one is the Primary Attachment. the default templates will display a large version of your image at the top of your blog post, both on the "recent posts" view and on the post's page view.

Layout Modules

Blogs package provides a selection of layout modules you can use to put blogs related content throughout our site.

• Last Blog Posts
  The last blog posts module displays lists of blog posts. There many parameters you can set to use this module to display a variety of different kinds of blog post lists.
  • sort_mode
    blog posts are naturally sorted by date, but they could be sorted by a variety of other data, such as author, or page hits, etc. @TODO - list a variety of example values here.
  • user [user login]
    list blog posts by a particular user. set user to be the login name of the user who's posts you want to list.
  • blog_id
    list blog posts that have been assigned to a particular blog
  • group_id
    list blog posts authored by users in a particular group
  • date_start_offset [hours]
    lists posts published since the number of hours that has elapsed.
  • status [draft]
    currently there is only one option for status: draft. When set to draft the module will display a list of the logged in user's draft blog posts.