Kevin Williams .NET and Stuff : Sitecore, eviblog

Checking Out WeBlog for Sitecore

Kevin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:08:00 GMT

So the next release of EviBlog for Sitecore is going to be called WeBlog… The new trac page and SVN have been set up - you can see for yourself here http://trac.sitecore.net/WeBlog/

Being the curious soul that I am, I decided to grab the latest code from Subversion and try to get it running on the latest Sitecore 6.5.0 Update-1. The primary difficulty I had was the lack of an up-to-date package ZIP to get the items into a clean Sitecore database (the WeBlog-pre 2.0.0.zip in Subversion was pretty out of date). I powered through and I think I’ve found all of the Sitecore items that needed to be updated. WeBlog does appear to be working, at least. :)

Figure 1 - The WeBlog tab in the Page Editor ribbon

So what’s new? Hard for me to say because I actually haven’t kept up on EviBlog development… So some of these features may be new to me, but not new to WeBlog. The first thing I noticed is the integration with Sitecore’s page editor. There is now a “WeBlog” tab in the ribbon with icons for creating new blogs, creating categories within a blog, or posting a new blog entry (see Figure 1). I only tried this as an admin user, so I don’t know how the security is set up on these buttons - but I imagine it’s possible to hide the new blog button from non-admins. However, restricting who can post to an individual blog doesn’t appear to be included and seems like it would be rather complicated to implement using Sitecore security. Maybe WeBlog needs a field on the Blog template to let you specify a security Role allowed to create new entries and they could check that when the New Entry button is clicked?

Figure 2 - Administration component

The next new thing I noticed was an Administration component at the bottom of the right rail (Figure 2). This only appears while in Edit mode and currently only allows you to modify what theme the blog is using. I couldn’t get this to work at all (changing the value in the drop-down caused the page to post back, but the change wasn’t reflected and it wasn’t possible to click the Save icon in the ribbon). An admin function might be better implemented using an EditFrame with a button to open the field editor. It looks like they’re already doing this with the “Blog” button in the “Settings” chunk in the ribbon.

Speaking of themes, WeBlog comes with a few but they are all just color variations of the same basic theme. It would be nice to see how flexible the mark-up and styling is - hopefully someone good at CSS can produce a really different looking theme to show off the capabilities. As far as how themes are implemented, they appear to just be a Sitecore item with one field pointing to a .CSS file on disk.

Additional new features include CAPTCHA support (with a built-in option as well as reCAPTCHA), and AddThis support for Facebook like buttons, a Tweet button (along with a counter), and the usual AddThis drop down to support other sharing possibilities (I see a sublayout for ShareThis too, but don’t know what it takes to get it working or if it’s global or can be configured per-blog).

In this build, some things definitely don’t work the way I’d expect. When I add a new entry to my blog in page editor using the “New Entry” button in the ribbon, it prompts me for the name of the new entry, but then doesn’t navigate me to the entry so that I can edit it (I suspect this may be due to WeBlog using the NewsMover module to move it into a year/month folder structure maybe). Also, the new entry doesn’t show up in the list of entries on the blog’s main page when it re-loads. If I force a refresh, it shows up and I can click on it to get to the entry and edit it. I already mentioned the non-working Administration component. WeBlog is still pre-release software, so I can’t ask for much… I just wanted to check it out since it’s been a while. It looks really good and I can’t wait to try out the release - hopefully coming soon!

Sitecore RSS Syndication and the EviBlog Module

Kevin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:31:00 GMT

Mark van Aalst’s EviBlog shared source module takes advantage of the new RSS feed features added to Sitecore in version 6.2, but if you haven’t set that up yet (I hadn’t!) then you may be wondering how to make it work. It’s actually quite simple!

In Content Editor, navigate in the tree to where you want your RSS feed URL to live. Add a content item using the /System/Feeds/RSS Feed data template and name it as you want it to appear in the URL. In my case, I wanted all of my site’s RSS feeds to have URLs such as http://www.kevinwilliams.name:8001/RSS/BlogName.aspx so I created a folder named RSS and created an RSS Feed matching my blog name (in this example, I used “TestBlog”). Heres a screenshot:

When setting up a Sitecore 6.2 RSS feed, the “Items” field defines what items will be included in the feed. You can either use a Sitecore query ( like query:/sitecore/content/Home/TestBlog/*[@@templatekey=‘blogentry’] ) or simply provide the path to an item whose children should be included in the feed like I did above. Enter a title and description for your blog, and that’s it! EviBlog is already configured with the proper Feed device settings for Sitecore 6.2, so this should be all you have to do. Publish changes and hit your URL to see the RSS feed for your blog! My test one is at http://www.kevinwilliams.name:8001/RSS/TestBlog.aspx.

Something that doesn’t come with EviBlog, but I wanted to add to my site was a “Subscribe via RSS” link on my blog page. To do this, I created a new XSLT Rendering called “RSS Link” and gave it a parameter to control the text that appears like this:

<xsl:param name="Link_Text">Subscribe via RSS</xsl:param>

Then I made the body of the template look like this:

<xsl:template match="*" mode="main">
<sc:link type="application/rss+xml">
<img src="/sitecore/shell/Themes/Standard/Custom/16x16/rss.png" alt="RSS Icon" border="0"/>
<xsl:value-of select="$Link_Text"/>
</sc:link>

</xsl:template>

I want this link to appear in my blog’s sidebar, but the renderings allowed there are restricted. To allow my rendering, I opened the content editor to /sitecore/Layout/Placeholder Settings/phBlogSidebar and added the “RSS Link” rendering to the Allowed Controls.

Lastly, I opened the main blog content item in the page designer, selected the “phBlogSidebar” placeholder, and added my RSS Link rendering. I opened the properties for the rendering and set the Data Source to the RSS feed I created earlier, clicked OK, and clicked Save in the designer. The “Subscribe via RSS” link now appears in my blog’s sidebar!

The only thing left to do would be add support for auto-discovery of my RSS feed (for aggregators like Google Reader). It’s rather simple ( there is an article about it here: http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm ), but requires inserting some HTML into your page’s <head> tag. One idea for doing this would be to re-implement the above RSS Link rendering as a sublayout instead and then add the HTML to Page.Header.Controls in the ASCX file’s Page_Load() or something. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. :)

EviBlog makes good use of Sitecore 6.2’s new RSS feeds feature and therefore it is very easy to add RSS to your blog. If you’d like more information about the new RSS feed functionality in Sitecore, take a look at the Presentation Component Cookbook on SDN or feel free to contact me if you need any help!

EviBlog Module for Sitecore 6.2

Kevin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:53:00 GMT

So I keep hearing about this EviBlog module for Sitecore and how it blows away the old blogs module and how I just have to check it out. So, I finally found some time over the weekend to do a fresh Sitecore 6.2 install, downloaded and installed EviBlog (you can get it here http://trac.sitecore.net/EviBlog/ by the way), and spent a few minutes playing with it.

Here's the site I created (dunno how long this will be up - if you're really interested in EviBlog, feel free to contact me):

http://www.kevinwilliams.name:8001/TestBlog.aspx

As you can see, I haven't done much with it yet, but I can say that Inline page editing works as advertised and the basic structure seems to be there to handle most blog needs. If the Live Writer integration and RSS feeds work as well, I can see myself using this on future projects for sure.

I linked these in the test blog post above, but if you are interested in EviBlog - I definitely think they're worth watching, so I'll link them again here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe3Ppqkxhxw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQUaXWTJyLs