Re: [GMG-Devel] About Blogging System Project

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Heya,

So Spaetz, Elrond and I just had a conversation on IRC.  Spaetz
advocated for making the blogpost just another media type, an idea I've
shot down multiple times over the course of MediaGoblin.  Well, I'm
finally convinced I'm wrong!

As Spaetz has pointed out, we already have commenting, tags, feeds,
etc.  Without making blogposts a media type, we'd be doing that all over
again.

My main concern has been that I think blogposts shouldn't show up on the
main gallery view.  I've been convinced that adding code so that
blogposts can opt out of this is actually pretty trivial, so I'm no
longer worried about that.

One of the arguments for making a blogging system into MediaGoblin was
so we could be a challenger for something like Tumblr.

Look here:
  http://mattspangler.com/

Looking at Tumblr some more, I've had some more thoughts on what a
blogging system in MediaGoblin could really be.

Blogposts could indeed be a media type, they just shouldn't operate
through the normal submit interface (easy enough, just don't let them
declare there are any types of files they accept).  Instead, they should
have their own separate entry section.

Implementation-wise, a blogpost could do one of two things:
 - Either simply a media type that doesn't have media!  The blogpost
   could entirely be the description.
 - Either that, or it could have a special media file that's actually
   the blogpost pre-rendering.  In that case, blogposts would skip using
   the description.

Which of these would it be?  I think the answer to that depends on
whether or not blogposts have some "special powers" that normal
descriptions don't.  More likely than anything for this this might
include:

 - embedding previous media
 - including various images and other html not currently allowed in
   descriptions (alternately, maybe we could get more loose on the
   present whitelist, which is extremely conservative at the moment)

I'm actually fairly convinced that regardless of which choice we make,
moving descriptions to be "cleaned HTML by default" rather than markdown
is a good choice.

Regarding the mechanisms for embedding previous media and etc, I'm not
sure if we want an extra markup for that, or what.

Well anyway, that's my present braindump on it all :)

 - cwebb