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Blogs - You don't need a hack to host blogs
by
07 Aug 2005
Why does anyone feel they need a hack to host blogs on their site? Its not necessary. 1. Create a forum called Blogs 2. Select 'NO' for "Act as Forum" - Now you have your Blogs category. 3. When a user requests a blog, create a forum under Blogs. They should provide a title, a description, and whether or not they want to accept comments. You can also add options like password protect to make it private. Much more powerful control than any journal hack. Blog entries & comments count against post counts. Reputation system extends to the blogs, etc. 4. Edit the permissions for the forum. Generally, people should be able to post, but not create threads. 5. Make the requesting user the moderator of their forum. Give them full reign over the forum BUT DO NOT ALLOW THEM EXPANDED user moderation roles. Minimal effort user blogs fully integrated into all VB functions. No hacks necessary. Future releases of VB will not break it. Blogs easily tied into subscriptions. RSS publishing as easily as any other forum. Blogs can have polls. Persistant read marks for blogs. New entries displayed via new posts. Multiple authors (moderators) for shared blogs. Ajax editing of entries. The list of things that make this better than any journal hack are nearly endless. And just because it doesn't NEED any hacks, doesn't mean other hacks won't enhance the functionality. Use the "Split Forumhome into several pages" hack to give your blogs their own home page. Thread Description v1.2 hack to give entries a description. vbSpell to spell check entries. Post Award Hack to recognize particular entries, etc. |