Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 11:30 pm

Well, here it is. The first test of this Blog MOD for phpBB. If this works, we'll use it in the new portal pages.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Bloggity blog blog.

It looks like we can post comments alright which is a good start hehe :)

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:11 am

Well, it's a start anyway.

I found this phpBB MOD called "Hyperion". It's a blog MOD for phpBB. So, it isn't technically part of the MX Portal stuff. It looks similar in a way, but has some quirky differences. For example, I can't easily modify the "block" layout of the blog page...it's all fixed HTML and style stuff.

In theory this is supposed to allow other blogs. But I had to really fuss manually with some database entries to get this blog to work, so I don't think I'll let anyone else create a blog for now.

I added the quick reply MOD to the Blog MOD and it seems to mostly work.

I'm afraid that the guy who coded this really did a rather kludgy job. It's better than starting from scratch, but it's a pretty brute force MOD. He is supposedly releasing a completely rewritten version soon that he is testing, so we might migrate to that once it's done.

For now, this basically does what I need. It's similar to using the forums like I did before (and in fact, it does use the forums). But the Blog home page has a nicer list of recent topics, and has a nice "Add new entry" button for me to use.

It claims to have an RSS feed, and someone else can test that for me.

I can't add any MX Portal blocks to the blog page itself, but I might add a "recent comments" block to the main portal page so that I can quickly jump to people's comments.

What I'll do is try to create a new topic entry for new daily subjects, rather than putting it all into one huge entry like I was doing before in the forums.

Let me know what you think.

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:13 am

Hmm, can Comments really have their own Subject?

In any case, it looks like the "Today At" fields are all broken for displaying the time. It might just be related to this first blog entry, so I'll see what happens tomorrow when I post a new entry.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

The search for new messages in the forums lists this blog but when I click on the arrow next to the last poster's name, I get the message "The topic or post you requested does not exist". The reply number increases as you add new material, but when trying to access this stuff it doesn't seem to find it. Don't know if you want to remove new blogs from the forum search, or somehow make this accessible or not even worry about it, but thought I'd let you know.

I guess it could be connected to the time thing, I have no idea how forum search operates. If it's trying to match against a null time that might be the problem.

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:46 am

No, I don't think it's the Time problem. And I *do* want the blog to be searchable. My guess is that it's "yet another bug". This system is full of them.

I also just realized that there is no "Category" field for the blog entry. So, I don't have any way to distinguish entries about programming, from entries about video games, movies, etc. I can't believe such a basic feature isn't part of this.

Sigh. Well, that's the price I pay for using someone elses code. Since I've gotten pretty familiar with this system, adding a category field shouldn't be hard. After all, he already added the silly Mood and Activity fields to the database.

Let me know if there are any other link problems like the Search problem.

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

Once you get the blog all happy, I think it should replace the 'recent forum posts' on the front page.

Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 7:51 pm

Hmm, I'm not sure about that. I still like seeing the recent forum posts to see what is going on in the forums easily.

But we *do* need a "recent blog posts" box somewhere. And I need to modify this so that instead of just saying "There are 3 comments" that it has the username of the last commenter and a link to jump to the last comment in the blog. Right now it's really hard for me to notice if anyone has posted a reply to a blog.

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 5:11 am

Today I fixed a number of issues:

1) The blog list shows the last person who commented and has a link to go to the last comment. I moved this to the top of the blog so I didn't have to scroll down to see if anyone had commented on the most recent entry.

2) Fixed the "Today at" date problem. Must have been a control code in the file. The code looked fine but when I copy and pasted it then it worked suddenly. Really weird!

3) Added a "Edit" button that only I can see to edit my initial entry.

4) Added a "New Entry" button that only I can see to easy add a new entry.

5) Various fixes to the blog theme template.

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 5:23 pm

Hmm, interesting...if you Reply to a blog entry with comments, you can't set a mood or activity. But if you then *Edit* your comment, you can set those fields and they display just fine. Don't know why they didn't put those fields in the Reply box, but I'll add that (not to the Quick Reply however)