Submitted by tony on Wed, 02/06/2008 - 05:24.
Project:VirtualNorthstar.org Web Site
Component:Code
Category:feature request
Priority:normal
Assigned:tony
Status:active
Description

Add some of the common elements that would be found on dedicated blog platforms, such as:
Archives
Personal Bio
Recent/ Highlighted entries summarized in sidebar
Very visible links to syndication feeds

Affects:
node-blog.tpl.php

Complications

Submitted by tony on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 17:59.

This is turning out to be significantly more complicated and involved than I had anticipated. The bad news is that means it will take a bit longer to close this ticket. The good news is that we will likely end up contributing some code back to the community when everything is done if I figure out how to write it.

Nice work

Submitted by Warren on Wed, 02/13/2008 - 12:37.

This looks GREAT! I really like the idea of contributing back to the community. Nice work Tony.

Partly done

Submitted by tony on Thu, 02/14/2008 - 06:00.

Okay, I now have it displaying the following on individuals' blog pages:

  1. The user's chosen picture
  2. A preferred public name for the user (or username if not set)
  3. The organization they are affiliated with (if specified)
  4. A list of some of their favorite web sites
  5. A summary of their 5 latest blog posts

Still left to do:

  1. Provide a calendar view or monthly summary of posts for accessing archives
  2. Provide archive views in the page content area
  3. Add a "personal bio" field, which will likely need both long and short forms, one for the main profile view and the other for the sidebar.
  4. Allow to choose between 5 most recent posts or 5 "hilighted" posts chosen by the user (or even by number of views/popularity?)
  5. Syndication links in the sidebar as well

The first two are in progress, with the current possible behavior being that we can show a calendar or an archive page for all users' posts. I am currently getting some help from someone for adding a user variable to the archive module to enable that filtering. So far we can do it, but only when already specifying the day you want to know about, where instead user filtering should take precedence over date filtering.

The bio field should be easy - I'm just pondering whether it should be two separate entries, or somehow able to automatically truncate it. This will eventually end up working with modifications to the staffbio module.

Syndication links should be easy - I'll start looking into the syndication-related issues for various parts of the site next.

#1

Submitted by tony on Wed, 02/06/2008 - 11:19.

Rather than affecting node-blog, this should be implemented as a block within the sidebar_right region. Set the visibility of the block to only be when node type is 'blog'. User pictures will also go in this block.