collective.blog.star 1.2.1

Blog suite for Plone

Introduction

collective.blog.*, or just blog.star, for short, is a suite of blogging modules for Plone. It is primarily designed for integrators. Most people who use Plone for blogging also uses Plone as a customized content management system, and they have specific requirements and their own skin, custom content types and other integrations. It turned out that other Plone blogging products make a lot of assumption about how you are to use it, what you want from a blog, and how your site is set up.

blog.star follows a set of principles to avoid these problems:

• Be modular. Not everyone wants everything your blogging software has to offer.

• Be flexible. Don’t assume that people want to use your software in one particular way.

• Be simplistic. If there is a simple way of doing it, do it that way.

• Be Ploneish. Plone already has 90% of what a blog needs built in. Use it.

Modular

blog.star is made up of several separate modules, that each do one thing only. The modules so far is:

• collective.blog.view: Provides a blog-style view for Plone folders and collections, with support for use in monthly archives.

• collective.blog.feeds: Uses basesyndication and fatsyndication to provide several types of XML/RDF feeds for folders/collections.

• collective.blog.portlets: Portlets useful for blogging, such as a monthly archive and a last posts portlet.

• collective.blog.star: A module that uses all of the above plus some extra modules like qi.portlet.tagClouds useful for blogging. Use this is if you just want simple blogging support in Plone. The development of collective.blog.star was sponsored by Jarn AS - http://www.jarn.com

Flexible

If a portlet would work great in a normal folder, why shouldn’t it? There is no need to add the arbitrary requirement that your portlets only works in folders that have a specific marker interface, for example. Marker interfaces are there to mark an object as being something special, even though that “special” doesn’t need a separate interface. Now a blog is just a container of blog entries with a blog view and archives etc. There is no reason any of your “blog” portlets would only work with a folder that is marked as being a blog. The portlets I’m writing for blog.star will work in any folder or collection.

Simplistic

The blog view doesn’t require anything particular from the blog entries, as long at they are archetypes objects. If they aren’t, well, then you need to make your own blog entry view, something you might want to do anyway, to control how they look in detail. Doing it is easy, you just create a view called blog_item_view for your content type.

Ploneish

Yes, you can configure Plone so that an objects default view becomes a special blog view when you set a marker interface on that object. But you can also just add the view to the list of allowed views in the portal type, and select the view from the view drop down. It’s simpler, more easily configurable, because you can now add that view even to custom folder types that you may have without digging into the code and figuring out what marker interface to put where. This is how the blog view of collective.blog.view works.

Requirements

blog.star requires Plone 4.

Installation

To install blog.star you simply add “collective.blog.star” to the list of eggs in your buildout, run buildout and restart the Plone server. In Plone’s portal_quickinstaller you select “blog.star” and install it.

Now you can create a normal folder, and in the Display menu you can select “Blog view” to make the folder into a blog. You add blog entries with the standard Page type, and you can even create podcast entries with the standard File type.

You also have a set of new portlets available, like a Monthly Archive, a Last Entries and a Tag Cloud portlet.

Commenting

If you need commenting, we recommend plone.app.discussion. The reason it’s not installed by blog.star is because under Plone 3 it’s not trivial to install, and in Plone 4 it’s included.

Changelog

1.2.1 (2013-10-19)

• Various bugfixes, and some more translations.

This version tested with Plone 4.1.6, 4.2.6 and 4.3.2.

1.2 (2013-05-27)

This version tested with Plone 4.0.10, 4.1.6, 4.2.5 and 4.3.

This will be the last major release to support Plone 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2. Plone 3 may work, but it is untested and unsupported.

blog.star 1.2 installs:

collective.blog.view 1.5 collective.blog.portlets 1.4 collective.blog.feeds 2.1

Under Plone 4.3 it now uses the new Plone syndication support instead of Fatsyndication. Fatsyndication is still a dependency, and will be installed, but will not be active under Plone 4.3. When upgrading to Plone 4.3, syndication will as a result stop working, and you must reconfigure it.

I plan to improve to Plone 4.4 with the small improvements to syndication that collective.blog.feeds implement under so that blog.star need not depend on collective.blog.feeds at all in future releases.

Changes to collective.blog.star:

• Added Spanish translation [macagua]

• Added i18n support [macagua]

1.1 (2012-04-17)

This version tested with Plone 4.0.10, 4.1.4 and 4.2b2.

It installs:

collective.blog.view 1.4 collective.blog.portlets 1.3 collective.blog.feeds 1.3

Note: When upgrading from Plone 4.0 to Plone 4.1, you need to import the “Plone Discussions” profile in portal_setup before the Blog View will work.

• Starting with 1.1, collective.blog.star will now pin the versions of collective.blog.view, collective.blog.portlets arnbd collective.blog.feeds. The main reason for this is to make a sort of “Known Good Set” of these modules without forcing you to use specific versions of other modules that change much more often.

  It also forces updates of collective.blog.star, which otherwise looks like it is unmaintained, when it is not.

1.0 (2010-06-05)

• Initial release

Tested with Plone 3.3.4 and 4.0b3