Although this isn't strictly a core development topic, many people feel strongly about blogging as being "core" to a CMS. Mostly users who are used to developing with Wordpress would ask about what blogging capabilities "SilverStripe" has.
We have run and maintained (for a given level of 'maintained') a number of modules surrounding blogging; namely blog, comments, and widgets. Some of these modules are quite legacy and haven't changed greatly in form since the 2.4 days, other than having been updated to work with 3.0/3.1.
In that time a lot of great alternatives has shot up, especially in the blog module category. Now we are thinking about what should be done with our own module(s) and how we can better maintain and update these to remain relevant.
To that end, we've been suggested that we should look at adopting a new module in place of the old, looking to the community for solutions. We would like to use Michael Strong's work,
https://github.com/micmania1/silverstripe-blogger/, which he has kindly offered to allow us to "officiate" as the preferred SilverStripe blogging platform.
The new module has many features similar to the old one:
- Support for widgets, with built in tags and archive widgets
- Support for blog holders and blog posts
- Tagging
- RSS Feed
Plus a lot of new features which we are excited about:
- Categories
- Management of Tags via dataobjects (which better supports renaming and tag management)
- Management of blog subpages via a datagrid, which suits blogs with many entries
- Standardisation of terminology: Instead of BlogTree, BlogHolder and BlogEntry, the module has Blog and BlogPost, which should make a bit more sense to those coming from other blogging platforms.
Less a few of the old features we weren't so crazy about having to maintain:
- BlogTree grouping (superseded by the categorisation)
- Front end authoring
- RSS consumption
Our plan, should we decide to go ahead with this, is to make the following changes:
- Branch the current blog/master as 1.0, and make the current version of micmania's blogger as master (aliased as 2.0)
- Develop a suitable migration toolkit for users wishing to upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0
- Develop a new default theme for blog
Our reasoning for doing this, rather than updating the old blog module:
- The old code has not aged well, and would require a lot of work to update
- The new code is much cleaner, and includes a lot of features we would otherwise have had to develop.
- Relying on the open source community to provide solutions, rather than preferring to develop all standard module support ourselves, better supports the community. We want works best and to hold that above the rest, without being precious about our own code.
Also on the roadmap are support for nested blog comments, of which there are a lot of existing solutions out there. Likely we will go through a similar process with the comments module as with the blog.
Kind regards,
Damian Mooyman