Weblogger Documentation

By Calvin Correli, former known as Lars Pind and Simon Carstensen

Download

The blogger now lives in the OpenACS cvs repository.

Getting started

Install the package on your system, mount a new instance somewhere on the site map, make sure you have create permission on the instance, and then visit the URL where you mounted it. Now you can add your first blog entry.

Syndicating a blog (putting it on your front page)

If you want to include a blog as part of another page, that's pretty simple.

If you're including in an ADP, say:

<include src="/packages/lars-blogger/www/blog" url="/blog">

... for the non-cached version, and ...

<%=[lars_blog_get_as_string -url "/blog"]%>

... for the cached version. There shouldn't be any problems using the cached version, as the cache should be flushed whenever anything changes.

From a Tcl page:

set blog_html [template::adp_parse "[acs_package_root_dir "lars-blogger"]/www/blog" [list url "/blog"]]

... for the non-cached version, and ...

[lars_blog_get_as_string -url "/blog"]

... for the cached version.

All of these are shown with an argument 'url' here, but they all take a package_id argument instead, if you prefer that and know what the package_id is. If nothing's supplied, the current package is used, which is generally not what you want.

Technical Info

The package fully supports multiple instances. You can mount several instances in your site map, and they'll stay properly isolated from each other. Alternatively you can let multiple users post to one instance by granting create permissions. Mounting Weblogger under, say, /blog, you will have /blog/user/screenname displaying the entries of one user and /blog displaying either a list of all bloggers (this is done by setting the parameter DisplayUsersP to 1) or all entries posted to the instance (the default).

Contents in your blog entries are assumed to be full-blooded ADP-ified HTML, so don't give people access to post a blog (i.e. grant create permissions on the instance) unless you trust them. This also means that if you've added custom ADP tags, those are also available to you in your blog.

Permissions

weblogs.com update ping

There are a couple parameters governing this feature. You can turn it on or off on a per-package basis. And you can specify which URL you want to export to weblogs.com, in case it's not the one the package instance is mounted at. This can be useful if you're including the blog on other pages, for example your site's front page. Thanks to Jerry Asher for the code to do this.

RSS Feed

The RSS feed is version 1.0 only, and uses the rss-support package. You should be able to simply visit the admin page of your new blogger instance and click the "Setup RSS" link, and you'll have an RSS feed.

Then you'll need to set the parameters and say that your rss_file_name is at /where-your-blogger-instnace-sists/rss/rss.xml. If you leave this blank, we won't advertise your RSS feed URL anywhere.

You can also supply your own channel image through the parameters.

XML-RPC APIs

The Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs are supported. An RSD link is placed on your Blog's front page, allowing XML-RPC client tools to automatically discover which API's they can use. See the XML-RPC package documentation for more details. Disable the XML-RPC server to disallow access to your blog via XML-RPC.

Posting From News Aggregator via URL

Some news aggregators can blog items you read via simply sending you to the proper URL. Here's what you need to specify in FeedDemon to make Blog-this-item work there:

URL-of-your-blog/entry-edit?title=$ITEM_TITLE$&title_url=$ITEM_LINK$&content=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$

Road Map

Version History

License

Released under the GPL.
lars@pinds.com