Introducing Apostrophe’s Blog Plugin
June 7th, 2010 by Tom 4 CommentsApostrophe, our content management system, now sports a nifty new blog plugin. And you can see it in action on GPTMC’s Philly360.
Wondering where the blog is? In the context of a larger website, a blog doesn’t always jump out and shake you by the lapels. On philly360 it’s the engine behind The Insider:
Notice the navigation links at the left. You can spelunk by category, date or tag.
Don’t see the categories? That’s because, on this particular site, they have been rebranded as “Features.” This is a common way to use Apostrophe blog categories: as separate “blogs.” It’s possible to set them up with entirely separate pages at any point in the site or, as in this case, as subpages of the main blog.
The Apostrophe blog plugin also drives the Events page:
But that’s not quite the whole story. In truth, the blog is front and center on the home page. Let’s take another look:
Notice the “News” and “Events” sections. These are Apostrophe slots pulling in recent blog posts and recent events from the blog plugin. Editors can plug in recent posts and events, or plug specific posts and events into specific pages. And designers can customize the presentation of posts to suit any page template.
Visitors can comment on blog posts in a spam-free environment, optionally logging in via Facebook, Twitter and several other services thanks to the excellent Disqus blog comment management service.
All of these capabilities are standard in Apostrophe’s blog plugin. And it’s open source, so Symfony developers can dive right in. Visit the Apostrophe documentation for details.
“Great, so how come your own blog is still running WordPress?” That will change! It’s not broken and we have plenty of client projects to build, so it’s not our first priority today. But our blog will be migrating to punkave.com/window. We need to take a little time to design it nicely and take advantage of Disqus’ “import comments from Wordpress” feature.
June 7th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Hey guys-
Very nice work, I know you guys at P’unk have spent a lot of time developing this – certainly more time than any other symfony, blog project that I know of.
So, my next selfish question is – how much of the plugin is apostrophe specific and how much of it is straight symfony? Could this lay the foundation for a goto, centralized blog mini-framework inside symfony? Do you even see that as necessary?
Thanks guys
June 7th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
It’s Apostrophe specific, but not just to be mean. (: We spent extra time and toil on this plugin to make sure that blog post content is made up of Apostrophe slots. Blog posts and events have templates (partials, technically speaking) that make standard Apostrophe a_area helper calls. And that means that you can mix rich text, video, slideshow, etc. slots exactly as you would in normal CMS page content.
Since you can also plug specific or recent blog posts into regular pages with blog slots, this amounts to a full-blown solution for reusing content in other contexts. And we’ve provided flexible ways to override the partial so that you get the right amount of detail, the right widths, etc. when you reuse a blog post in any particular page template.
(We also provide calls to get just the text and just the attached media, and these are convenient in the default “excerpt view” partials used in slots, but don’t be fooled – you can also choose to render the post’s Apostrophe slots in their full glory instead just as they appear on the main blog page.)
See the blog plugin documentation for details.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:34 am
[...] P’unk Ave has announced that its open-source content management system Apostrophe is now delivering a blog plugin that seamlessly provides publishers with a blogging platform that can be retrofitted to multiple [...]
July 15th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
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