Background
Tiki has more features out-of-the box than any other CMS or groupware package out there. While some features are complete and consistent (like wiki, file galleries and articles), others are incomplete, lack core functionalities and have significant bugs. Blogs are one of those features that need some improvement. We don't want to be better than Wordpress for someone just looking for a blog tool. But the goal of this project is to make blogs one of the good features of Tiki.
What we would like to change in Tiki blogs
New stuff
- Post comment watch. Either make blog watch include watching blog comments, or another watch for each post comments, or let the blog creator choose if watches include comment watches.
- List posts in a blog per tag or category
- Spam filter (Zend_Service_Akismet, Mollom, Defensio, etc.)
- Trackbacks
- Needs a trackback library. ZF has a proposal for a trackback class that should be in the next major release (1.11) due to September.
- Feed for post comments
- Implement Gravatar and/or Libravatar
- Use a categoryID as tree parent to have a different set of categories per blog
- Module to show tags or categories per blog
- Decide if we want to change to Zend Tag
- Post status: draft, pending revision, published or archived
- Could use categories
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Improve interface to add media video. Easier way to embed Youtube, Blip.tv and Vimeo videos wihtout needing to validate the potentially unsafe HTML plugin call. -
Categorize posts. -
Comments admin panel -
Comments moderation -
Post comments admin page -
Post excerpt field -
Extend the "blog heading" field idea to add a similar "post heading" field. -
Display related posts in the bottom of each post
Features improvements
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Add image interface (advanced options button, generic for all wikiplugins) -
Better anti-bot verification code (including recaptcha option). Zend_Captcha. -
Post previews which look the same as the final view -
Allow a blog admin to list the posts from his own blog only. Example: tiki-list_posts.php?blogId=5 lists all blog posts, and not just hte ones from blog 5. - In some places being the author of the blog means if have admin rights (like creating a new blog post) and in others don't (listing blog comments)
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The new "Editing the Publish date" feature should be made optionnal. Some people want to keep posting simple, and it does not work well with watches (which send mails when it's posted, not at publish date) - Make watches respect publish dates and draft ('priv'=y) mode
Interface changes
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Acceptable display when feature is activated by default-Discussion- What do you mean by that? - rodrigo
- I mean on 3.5 with coelesce theme, I had to twist the tpls quite a lot. Maybe this is already solved in Tiki 5. Otherwise I plan to make my twisting generic and commit them later at Barcelona (no time now).
- Jean-Marc, maybe your template twists are needed for every/any theme's blog layout, but when trying to implement the Coelesce theme's blog design intially, I found its layout was quite different from the existing Tiki blog layout, and this problem came up again when the Strasa theme was designed (as a visual concept), with blog page components again positioned differently from the Tiki "standard". (I look forward with mixed feelings to how Simon decides the Fivealive blogs should look
.) Up til now, the solution for this has been either radical CSS positioning - if that works, but sometimes it can't manage it and frequently this introduces browser-specific display problems - or a forked tiki-view_blog.tpl, etc. for the theme. This is why I propose (and will document in detail) a kind of "blog file wrapper" similar to what is done in the site header, so each theme can position blog title, author info, post content and so on freely, without the blog post display code itself needing to be touched. (Gary)
- Gary: Just so you don't have to wonder about how much I twisted, you can have a look at the kind of result I recently achieved: http://impro-amicale.jmlibs.name/tiki-view_blog_post.php?postId=12&comzone=show I mostly rearranged parts and added classes. The "blog file wrapper" sounds like something I would have found useful. Another one is here: http://commissioner.cws.coe.int/ but it's a heavily modified fluidindex.css upgraded to 3.5, with no comments. So it's a dead-end as far as I'm concerned.
- Jean-Marc, maybe your template twists are needed for every/any theme's blog layout, but when trying to implement the Coelesce theme's blog design intially, I found its layout was quite different from the existing Tiki blog layout, and this problem came up again when the Strasa theme was designed (as a visual concept), with blog page components again positioned differently from the Tiki "standard". (I look forward with mixed feelings to how Simon decides the Fivealive blogs should look
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Blog template file wrapper method (see also http://zukakakina.com/blogdev/ and http://zukakakina.com/tiki-index.php?page=Blog%20files%20revamp) -
A nice theme style with horizontal image, and tabs on top as menus for the personal blog. Like the ones on most blogs out there.-Discussion- Example:
http://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/beautyofcode-jquery-plugin-for-syntax-highlighting/ - An annotated screenshot of that WP theme and how it could be done with Tiki: http://zukakakina.com/display65.
- Update: This is now implemented at http://zukakakina.com/blogdev/. There are no theme modifications. Only Look and Feel options are used to make this layout (including custom CSS that narrows the fixedwidth div to 780px and reduces div#header-top to 0). I'll itemize them soon.
- Example:
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Comments previews which look the same as the final view -
Add post title to tiki-list_posts.php -
Print post (still very simple but now at least it is not broken)
Small interface changes
- Add interface to let the user control the max number of posts listed (default is 10)
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Global post-level comments should be on by default and default ordering should be "oldest first" -
Hide current heading preview and create a icon to display it in tiki-edit_blog.php -
View post link when editing a post (tiki-blog_post.php) -
make title for comments optional -
module last comments on blogs now uses the format "$name on $postTitle" -
next and previous post links -
optional website field for post comments -
optional email field for post comments (only useful for the admin now, but can be used in the future for notification) -
Comments: move 'name' on top -
Replace "Required" with the asterisk
Features to be removed
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tiki_blog_posts_images: remove the interface to add new images using this method (it is possible to add images using the file gallery system) and keep the table to support old installation -
"Display titles in blog posts"-Discussion- Rodrigo: This allows the user to decide whether or not display the title of each post in the blog main page and in the post page. Since the feature is inconsistent (breaks the layout, don't remove the title field from the edit post page, etc) and I don't see a reason to have a blog post without a title I'm planning to remove it unless someone wants to keep it and is willing to work to make it consistent.
What a good blog tool has
[+]Comparison table
[+]Some ideas
[+]People ready to help
- Pascal St-Jean
- Gary (chibaguy)
- Jean-Marc (Jyhem)
- amette
- rodrigo
- Sébastien Lord-Jetté (slordjette)
- Xavi
Profile Easy Blog
During TikiFestBarcelona2 we created a basic Easy Blog profile, to test the current features in tiki, with the improvements developed as they are added to Tiki.
Please, feel free to update this profile so that it reflects wht can be done with Tiki and the Blog Revamp eforts that are going on these months.
Related links
- http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/wiki/ProductConversionsMatrix
- http://www.weblogmatrix.org/compare/b2evolution+Blogger+DotClear+Geeklog+Movable-Type+Serendipity+Textpattern+Wordpress
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