Collective Blogging

This page is deprecated... OSGeo now runs a blog "Planet" site. For more information see PlanetOSGeo.

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This is a quick overview of super experimental and basic collective blogging facilities on the prototype OSGeo 'community' site. I thought this would be better here than in email.

How to Work It

• Log in to site
• Follow create content link in menu on bottom right (currently)
• From exciting range of content options to create, choose blog entry
• Write blog post. This especially does not need to be long, involved, poetic or thoughtful. It is probably better to write a paragraph a week than an essay a month.
• Select from list of 'Activities' aka Committees, which group this blog entry is most relevant to (can choose more than one if wishing)
• Press Preview
• Remember this only gets you a preview stage, then you must scroll down and press Submit after the preview and this can be non-obvious.
• Then your bloggage appears on the bottom of whichever committee pages you attached it to. Or can also be hauled out via RSS or through a "planet" like view on a per-committee or per-person or whole-lot-at-once basis.

How it Works Underneath

What hauls the blogs out per category is a custom block. It is called news/blogs by category and you see it at the top of administer->blocks. Inside it has a nasty SQL query embedded in PHP. It is configured to only show up on certain pages - that is a list set manually at the bottom of the block configuration page. So if you add a new Committee/other menu item on the left (through administer->menus) and want category based blogging to show up on it, you need to add the path to the new page, to the list in the block.