collective.blog.star 1.0

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 fodlers/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 3 or 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.