Resend: Traditional Blog Format????

I am confused about how to create a “traditional” blog using SPIP. What I mean by a traditional blog is: they are formatted as a chronological series of postings (with comments) from the same author. Although SPIP marvelously accomplishes the goal of allowing multiple authors to publish, it seems to be formatted moreso as an article forum as opposed to a blog forum. I am seeking to establish a hybrid site that enables the following publications from multiple authors:

  • Articles (currently available)
  • News links (currently available)
  • Blogs (does SPIP do this in a “traditional” format for multiple bloggers???)

So when an author logs in to publish, it seems they would be presented with the above three options. Also, it seems that somewhere on the site, a user would be able to view any author’s blog in the traditional blog format. This would be important especially for thematic blogs (as opposed to random ranting blogs). Does SPIP accomplish this natively, or would this require customization?..Or perhaps this was not the intended scope of SPIP???

M. Dwayne Richards

Cofounder and Principal Consultant
ePrimeMarketing, Inc.

Marketing Metrics and ROI

www.ePrimeMarketing.com

mrichards@e-primesolutions.com


"I know that half my marketing budget is wasted,…
…I just don’t know which half."
-John Wanamaker: Creator of the first Department Store

I am
seeking to establish a hybrid site that enables the following publications
from multiple authors:

Articles (currently available)
News links (currently available)
Blogs (does SPIP do this in a "traditional" format for multiple bloggers???)

What is the difference between a blog and an article with a keyword
like "blog" ?
You could extract the list of blog posts by looking for such article
attached to this keyword, and them formatting these article in an
appropriate way..

<B_regroup_posts>
<ul>
<BOUCLE_regroup_posts(GROUPE_MOTS){titre="blog"}>
  <BOUCLE_posts(ARTICLES) {titre_mot=#TITRE}>
     <li>#_posts:TITRE</li>
  </BOUCLE_posts>
</BOUCLE_regroup_posts>
</ul>
</B_regroup_posts>

The GROUPE_MOTS loop isn't actually really documented [1] (and can not
be found at the index of SPIP : Glossaire - SPIP ). Here, it
finds all the keywords which are in the group "blog". The problem here
is that you'll list articles by keyword and not by age..

a simpler solution for you (with only one keyword "blog") is

<BOUCLE_mot_cle (ARTICLES) {titre_mot=affichage} >
<li><a href="#URL_ARTICLE">#TITRE</a></li>
</BOUCLE_mot_cle>

regards,

.Gilles

[1] GROUPE_MOTS is annonced for the version 1.8 at

(in french)

Gilles;
I follow your reasoning. I too have spent time thinking about how to
accomplish the traditional format of a blog with SPIP's current
capabilities. I am not sure I've figured it out so tell me if you think I'm
missing something. I think I see two issues:

1. Blogs are typically organized by author. So searching on a keyword may
bring up the person's blog, but may also bring additional postings that do
not belong to the author. But searching by author would only find postings
by that author. Now if we could use a keyword such as "Tom's Blog on the
Stock Market", the question would be, could we limit that keyword so that
only Tom could post articles to it, although others may post comments? The
next question would be after Tom made his initial article post, how does he
make subsequent posts under that same keyword (Tom's Blog on the Stock
Market"? My guess is this might be a less practical approach. Do you agree?

2. The second issue I see (which you also identified) is format. If a site
visitor were to click on the keyword "Tom's Blog on the Stock Market", how
would we ensure the results are atomatically formatted in reverse
chronological order?...without requiring cleverness (manual formatting) from
the site visitor??? It should be automatic and intuitive for the site user
to view a blog in this format. This is how traditional blogs are formatted.

Although I am not a programmer, I think I understand the function of the php
code snippets you provided. So I guess you are telling me that the blogging
cannot be accomplished through native capability of SPIP, but with some
custom programming. Is that correct?

I don't mean to debate the issue here, I'm just asking the questions as a
sanity check in case I've overlooked something about SPIP' native
capabilities. I am working on an RFQ for configuring and programming a few
additional features, using SPIP as a starting point. So the questions are to
help me develop better insight about SPIP's capabilities. This way my RFQ is
reasonable.

Would it be OK to post such an RFQ in this forum? I plan to post the RFQ to
scriptlance.com also because my budget is limited and scriptlance.com is
usually good for obtaining competitive economical quotes. However, I think
there is also value to finding someone who has considerable insight about
the native capabilities of SPIP, rather than a simple php hack. So maybe
this forum is also a good place to post...if that is permitted...?

Thanks for your insight and comments.

malcus

-----Original Message-----
From: Gilles Vincent [mailto:gilles.vincent@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2005 4:56 AM
To: malcus
Cc: spip-en@rezo.net
Subject: Re: [Spip-en] Resend: Traditional Blog Format???

I am
seeking to establish a hybrid site that enables the following publications
from multiple authors:

Articles (currently available)
News links (currently available)
Blogs (does SPIP do this in a "traditional" format for multiple

bloggers???)

What is the difference between a blog and an article with a keyword
like "blog" ?
You could extract the list of blog posts by looking for such article
attached to this keyword, and them formatting these article in an
appropriate way..

<B_regroup_posts>
<ul>
<BOUCLE_regroup_posts(GROUPE_MOTS){titre="blog"}>
  <BOUCLE_posts(ARTICLES) {titre_mot=#TITRE}>
     <li>#_posts:TITRE</li>
  </BOUCLE_posts>
</BOUCLE_regroup_posts>
</ul>
</B_regroup_posts>

The GROUPE_MOTS loop isn't actually really documented [1] (and can not
be found at the index of SPIP : Glossaire - SPIP ). Here, it
finds all the keywords which are in the group "blog". The problem here
is that you'll list articles by keyword and not by age..

a simpler solution for you (with only one keyword "blog") is

<BOUCLE_mot_cle (ARTICLES) {titre_mot=affichage} >
<li><a href="#URL_ARTICLE">#TITRE</a></li>
</BOUCLE_mot_cle>

regards,

.Gilles

[1] GROUPE_MOTS is annonced for the version 1.8 at

(in french)

malcus wrote:

I am confused about how to create a “traditional” blog using SPIP. What I mean by a traditional blog is: they are formatted as a chronological series of postings (with comments) from the same author. Although SPIP marvelously accomplishes the goal of allowing multiple authors to publish, it seems to be formatted moreso as an article forum as opposed to a blog forum. I am seeking to establish a hybrid site that enables the following publications from multiple authors:

    * Articles (currently available)
    * News links (currently available)
    * Blogs (does SPIP do this in a “traditional” format for multiple
      bloggers???)

So when an author logs in to publish, it seems they would be presented with the above three options. Also, it seems that somewhere on the site, a user would be able to view any author’s blog in the traditional blog format. This would be important especially for thematic blogs (as opposed to random ranting blogs). Does SPIP accomplish this natively, or would this require customization?...Or perhaps this was not the intended scope of SPIP???

Have you seen the templates like spip.clear and the Bones collection:
Spip-Clear - SPIP-Contrib (see a demo: http://spip.blog.ouvaton.org/)
http://www.aucuneid.net/bones/

that are both blog template that can use dotclear themes or wordpress kubrick themes (only for Bones kubrick)

There is also blip and bloog:
http://www.cent20.net/article.php3?id_article=32
http://bloog.net/

that are also blog-oriented templates for SPIP.

After that, if you want to organise that by author, you can create a section by author, with the blog "index" page as the section page and giving restricted administration privileges only to the author of that section. This is what is usually done for multiple blogs with one SPIP backend.

There is actually someone developping a "blog factory" to enable automatic creation of this type of blogs with SPIP.
There is also, in the main branch of development for the 1.9a of SPIP progress toward sharing the same source base between multiple sites. Therefore having individual/independent backend and frontend but using the same source => less space on the server is used.

Pierre

malcus wrote:

I am confused about how to create a “traditional” blog using SPIP. What I mean by a traditional blog is: they are formatted as a chronological series of postings (with comments) from the same author. Although SPIP marvelously accomplishes the goal of allowing multiple authors to publish, it seems to be formatted moreso as an article forum as opposed to a blog forum. I am seeking to establish a hybrid site that enables the following publications from multiple authors:

    * Articles (currently available)
    * News links (currently available)
    * Blogs (does SPIP do this in a “traditional” format for multiple
      bloggers???)

So when an author logs in to publish, it seems they would be presented with the above three options. Also, it seems that somewhere on the site, a user would be able to view any author’s blog in the traditional blog format. This would be important especially for thematic blogs (as opposed to random ranting blogs). Does SPIP accomplish this natively, or would this require customization?...Or perhaps this was not the intended scope of SPIP???

Have you seen the templates like spip.clear and the Bones collection:
Spip-Clear - SPIP-Contrib (see a demo: http://spip.blog.ouvaton.org/)
http://www.aucuneid.net/bones/

that are both blog template that can use dotclear themes or wordpress kubrick themes (only for Bones kubrick)

There is also blip and bloog:
http://www.cent20.net/article.php3?id_article=32
http://bloog.net/

that are also blog-oriented templates for SPIP.

After that, if you want to organise that by author, you can create a section by author, with the blog "index" page as the section page and giving restricted administration privileges only to the author of that section. This is what is usually done for multiple blogs with one SPIP backend.

There is actually someone developping a "blog factory" to enable automatic creation of this type of blogs with SPIP.
There is also, in the main branch of development for the 1.9a of SPIP progress toward sharing the same source base between multiple sites. Therefore having individual/independent backend and frontend but using the same source => less space on the server is used.

Pierre