Re: [GMG-Devel] About Blogging System Project

[Sebastian Spaeth]

Hi Aditi,

On 15.04.2013 15:23, Aditi Mittal wrote:
> Thanks for your email. I have created development enviroment on my system.

Cool, thanks for keeping me updated as I am somewhat out of the loop
right now.

> 1)The plugin should provide facility to write and edit posts with the
> option of plain HTML with an embedded HTML WYSIWIG editor.
> Or we could use text to HTML convertors like Markdown, BBCode where
> writing raw HTML is not needed.
> Or we could simply integrate TinyMCE to our editor. 

Right, that is actually the easiest part. Editing can happen using any
Wysiwyg editor that we can find. I would recommend we store Markdown,
RestructuredText, or HTML and convert to "cached HTML" whenever a post
is saved.

I would suggest that a "blog post" is essentially just a new form of a
media type, just like "audio", "video", etc. This way we can use most of
the existing infrastructure. E.g. we get categories for free by using tags.

> 2)The authors should be able to create categories and assign
> entries(blogposts) to them.

If we use "blogpost" as a new media type, you can add tags to your blog
posts, you can also define a "blog" as a "collection" of blog posts.

> 3)We also can define the status of post whether it is a draft, live post
> or a hidden post.

Right, the status could be meta-data, just like the image width/height
of a picture.

> 4)Visitors to the blopost should be able to comment on the post
> according to rights provided by the author 
> of the post. There should also be feature to modify or delete comments
> to keep the blog free from spam. 
> And author should have rights to announce whether his post is
> commentable or not.

Again, I would recommend we reuse the existing commenting infrastructure
which can already allow commenting of media.

> 5) Only users who are are signed would be able to comment on the blogposts.

This -if handled- by the MediaGoblin commenting system would be outside
the scope of the project, as it would rely on the site policy (who may
comment media).

> 6)There is should be facility to browse the posts by date, category or
> labels assigned to them.

Browsing by date, by tag or "collection" (=blog) is already possible.

> 7)We should also provide the search facility to search for a specific post.


> 8) There should be embed support to media in blogposts and comments.   

This might be a trickier one. For a start, it might be sufficient to
refer to uploaded MediaGoblin media from a post. Adding in Media is
something that could be part of the future. (IMHO, don't take on a too
big task, rather a narrow but feasible one).

> I would like to discuss the other features which I have missed out, and
> how will we 
> go about implementing the above requirements. I also am eager to know
> whether the blogging system 
> shold be developed from scratch or we could use some existing solution?

What do you think about using the MediaGoblin media infrastructure to
use a "blogpost" media type? This way a blog post would be shown in the
media time line just as other media is. A blog could be browsed by
attaching all posts to a "blog" collection, and blog posts could get
tags assigned too.

@cwebber, have you thought about this?

spaetz