Some Thoughts on Blogging with ProcessWire

[FuturShoc]

I have, of course, seen Ryan's excellent "Blog Profile" for ProcessWire. As I understand it, this package serves as a replacement to the default site and assumes blogging is the main purpose of any PW site it's applied to.

Great. But at our shop, blogging is almost always just a *part* of what a client site is intended to do. A blog is merely a *section* in a larger site.

So, that brings me to my likely need to put together more of a drop-in addition for PW to make it easy to *add* a blog to an existing ProcessWire site. As it happens, I'd really like to do some work in the PW community to help expand PW's overall appeal. Seems to me, a drop-in blog module would be a great place to start.

Has anyone else gone this route or had ideas they might want to share? I'm not so much looking for code here. This would be more of a discussion about approach, feasibility, and a wish list for such a module.

[Marty Walker]

Hi FuturShoc,

There was this from Nico you might have seen: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/899-bundleblog/?hl=blog

I'm in the process of adding blog sections to some existing PW sites and creating a couple of new dedicated blogs from scratch. What I'm finding is that each one will be  different in terms of the functionality required. It's be nice to have something 'drop in' but I think it'd be difficult to cater for every need.

Cheers

Marty

[FuturShoc]

I can't imagine why any such effort would be "difficult". Every other content management system with any level of adoption has at least one similar module available.

Blogs almost always include a handful of standard features:

1. A holder page for a list of links to each entry.

2. A dedicated page for each entry.

3. Optional comments for each blog entry.

4. Common sidebar "widgets" for monthly and yearly archives.

5. Possibly an RSS subscription icon or text link.

Pretty standard, no?

Of course, it's impossible to be all things to all people. But if that was the goal, no blog module would ever get written.

[Pete]

Really all you need is a few template files and a module would simply serve to create the relevant fields and install the comments module for you.

Technically that's pretty simple to achieve, but on a brand new site you could just start with the blog profile and add other pages. It's no different than a normal install except it has blog functionality out of the box - it's really easy to add other pages to it as there's nothing preventing anyone from doing that.

I can't remember the layout of the blog profile off the top of my head, bit assuming the homepage template lists blog posts you would just set up a /blog page with it's own template, move the code from the homepage template into it and you have successfully moved the blog into its own section.

[Wanze]

My suggestion: Start with the blog profile and build the rest of your site around.

I just finished a site this way - the blog lives under a "blog" menu.

The advantages: You have all the features of a blog "out of the box", in my case I didn't even need them all.

Take a look at the blog profile:

There's a file called "blog.inc.php" with functions for searching and listing posts, comments etc. which you can reuse also on other parts of the site.

All the markup of the blog is separated in a folder "markup", should you want to change this.

Cheers

[FuturShoc]

Thanks, Wanze. I hadn't really looked into the files contained in Ryan's "Blog Profile", so I had assumed there was something special about them that made them exclusive.

It sounds like your suggestion might be a good way to go.

Thanks to everyone for their input.

[NooseLadder]

@FuturShoc Did you get any further with this as I am interested in doing the same?

[Luis]

@NooseLadder : my advice, just do it

You only win, at least you learned something and you gained experience.