What is the best way to add blogging to my site?

[srbobc]

I have a client that I am moving into PW.  She is interested in having blogging on the new site.  What do you suggest I do?

I could easily add a link to an external blogger like blogspot.  Is this what others are doing?  Any suggestions are appreciated.

[apeisa]

I have a client that I am moving into PW.  She is interested in having blogging on the new site.  What do you suggest I do?

I could easily add a link to an external blogger like blogspot.  Is this what others are doing?  Any suggestions are appreciated.

Hi and welcome to the forums srbobc!

If your clients blogging needs are relatively simple, you could easily create new template like "blogentry" and add it fields like "title", "datetime", "body", "images", "comments" (http://processwire.com/talk/index.php/topic,76.msg405.html#msg405) and maybe "categories" (page) and stuff like this. Then it would be probably wise to add also template "blogfront" where you could render latest blog posts that are children of that page, with pagination of course (and if you are using categories, then allow url segments and render posts from those categories also).

This might sound much more complicated than it is, but simple news listing, product list, blog etc is very straightforward to setup after you do it once. Customizing it exactly for your needs is where pw is at it's best: you have full control of every aspect of the output.

If you need a lot more features, and maybe not so much control, then your best bet would probably be blogger, wordpress or something like that. Of course one possibility is to run self hosted wp and pw (wp & pw, hehe) side by side. Anyone done that yet?

[ryan]

I'd like to build a ready-to-go blog site profile in PW at some point. I think PW would lend itself very well to building a blog. But the need comes up so rarely in my own work, that I haven't done much other than experiment ... my site (ryancramer.com, in PW1) is loosely in a blog format, though I built that several years go and it's long past time for a redesign and redevelopment.

On sites where the client has asked for a blog, I've used WordPress. ProcessWire and WordPress run alongside each other quite well. Then I'll use WordPress RSS feeds to pull blog entry headlines into ProcessWire so that they can be output anywhere on the site, so make it seem like it's all running together...

[diogo]

I was playing with tumblr API inside processwire and I think it integrates quite well. Using simplexml you can have complete control of the markup (ok, not complete...) and, for what i've seen, even a complete separation of kind of posts, tags, etc. You can also make your tumblr blog private, so it will only be visible inside the site (hm... i have to confirm if this is really true). I think it wouldn't even be difficult to pull the data to your databaseif you want to keep it. So, If you don't mind putting your data on a server you don't control, i think it can be a neat solution

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api

http://finlay.tumblr.com/post/529010691/embed-tumblr-into-your-website (if you copy the code from here you should replace the quotation marks)

I'm only a graphic designer adventuring on learning webdesign and programming. Please correct me if i'm saying everything wrong here

[ryan]

Diogo, thanks for highlighting this option. This is good to know about the API that tumblr is providing. I think this would be especially useful if you already had something running in Tumblr or had a client that wanted to use it, but have the rest of their site powered by PW. Not to mention, I think they provide some tools for simple posting from mobile devices (?) so there may be benefits in multiple areas to doing this. As far as building a basic blog functionality, I still think using PW is going to be a simpler task then trying to pull the data from their API, but this is an excellent addition to this thread and a good solution for people that prefer to use Tumblr with their blog.