SilverStripe Blog Module - Looking forward and a fresh start

[Damian Mooyman]

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- BlogTree grouping (superseded by the categorisation)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.

The current work in progress can be seen on the blog 'develop' branch at https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-blog/tree/develop

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

[Cam Findlay]

Looking forward to seeing the blog get a fresh start, have been following micmania1's blogger module for some time and make a lot of sense to bring these together since 'blogging' as a general feature is something that probably only needs to be solved well once. 

Keen to get the proposed list of features up if anyone wants to collab on this. Damian, where is the best place to submit any contribution pull requests against? the silverstripe/blog or micmania1/blogger repo?

Cam

[Florian Thoma]

Hi Damian,

What is the current state of this? is the master branch of silverstripe/blog ready for being used?

Thanks.

Flo

[3dgoo]

I just wanted to say, great work so far on the new blog module. 

We've just installed the new blog and are amazed by the updates. 

Great work.

Cheers,

Michael

[Haley Buggs]

Is this still being worked on? The link to the development is broken.

[off...@netwerkstatt.at]

It’s now official:

 

https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-blog

 

http://www.silverstripe.org/blog/blog-2-0/

 

Cheers, wmk

 

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[Sigurd Magnusson]

Yup. Are you referring to http://www.silverstripe.org/blog/blog-2-0/ ? :) not far from release.

Kind regards,

Sigurd

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[Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up]

I am looking forward to the official release - can you let us know when that will take place (we are currently using beta, but I am keen to upgrade to a stable tag as soon as it is possible).

Has the tag field been fixed?  I was using https://github.com/silverstripe-labs/silverstripe-tagfield/branches/tractorcow-patch-1, but that seems to have disappeared. 

Thank you

Nicolaas

​

[Christopher Pitt]

Indeed! 2.0 has been tagged: https://github.com/silverstripe-labs/silverstripe-tagfield/releases

Be sure to check the readme for usage examples...