SilverStripe releases blog module with drag'n'drop widget system

Posted by Sigurd on 17 September 2007

Productive times! Brian, Jeremy and Andrew have been working over the past weeks to produce a free blog module for download. This is in parallel with Andrew releasing SilverStripe v2.1 and Ingo working towards v2.2 with our Google Summer of Code students, so it certainly feels like Christmas around here!

• Download blog module (requires SilverStripe 2.1)
  
• Visit demo.silverstripe.com/blog

Tour of the blog module 

Blog comes out of the box working without any customisation necessary. You can easily and completely change the look and feel by making your own theme...

Note the "tags" and "archive" widgets on the left hand panel; these can be completely customised in the administration system mentioned below.

Replying to a post is fun and quick, thanks to AJAX. It's just like the page commenting feature that you can demo already...
 

Writing posts

Writing a new blog post is also quick and easy, and offers bbcode formatting, just like our forum module. To ensure you spend your time writing and not manipulating the system, we've made it so you can write the post from within the site as well as inside the main CMS administration interface.

Drag'n'Drop widget system

One of the key features of any blog system are widgets, or small, easily installable features to personalise your blog. The module comes with tag clouds, archives-list and RSS feed out of the box.

One of the real gems of this module is the drag-and-drop system to manage it. Available widgets are shown on the left of the interface, and when dragged to the right, are enabled and can be configured. For instance, you can tell the RSS Feed widget to use feed://feeds.feedburner.com/ajaxian and your blog would always show the latest AJAX news.

You can also drag the widgets up and down to reorder them on your site.

We'd also like to make a call for widget developers. We already have Lakshan working on a few to compliment the flickr, technorati and youtube work he's done as part of Google Summer of Code. Check out the widget documentation and add them to the contributions forum. 

Spam: Akismet, Math Question & Moderation 

To battle the comment spam any popular blog gets, you can set up Akismet. This automatically prevents comment spam most of the time. Alternatively you can set up Math Question, which forces people to answer questions like "What is four plus five?", again reducing the spam your blog gets.

The comments area of the CMS lets you review all your comments, and mark items as spam or not.

Summary

Today marks the initial release of the blog module. We'd love for you to download it it and tell us what you think and help us prioritise features, and if you're feeling up to, contribute patches, widgets, and themes yourself!