vanilla blog

jsanders

first, a disclaimer: i have a habit of pushing things much further than they were ever originally intended to go. i like to find the limitations of things. years ago, when livejournal first debuted, i was always wondering if it would be feasable to use the same software (with a little tweaking) to do two similar but distinct functions: first, it would be a forum, with all that goes along with that. second, it could be a journaling/blogging software with comments built in. when i originally thought this up, i figured it would really just be a matter of style and arrangement, with only a few minor things required. in case you haven't realised this yet, this is totally just brainstorming, and i fully expect this to never happen. so you've got a vanilla installation, and user billy would have the option to create a journal for himself. all this journal really is, though, is a collection of threads - discussions - that are "administered" by billy. he controls the visibility and permissions, whether people can reply or comment on his entries, and what the default style of his pages is. of course, these discussions wouldn't be displayed in any sort of view from the forum side of things. i would imagine this is all possible with some extensions and cleverness. vanilla has much better support for options in the database than our user management system did, because ours required a new column for each new option. alrighty, brainstorming mode off. feel free to tear my ideas apart.

lech

solution : extension :D

Mark

Well, to be honest, I have about seven different ideas for applications sitting in my head just waiting to be developed. A blog is one of them. It would be built on the same framework as Vanilla is, but it would also allow templating through a clever method I've dreamed up. I will probably enable that same method for Vanilla version 2 (whenever that happens). Anyway. Yeah. I just wish I could do this full time.

jsanders

when i get a chance to work on it, and after we get all the basics for getting our forum ported, i'll probably attempt an extension to do exactly this. since you're a coding badass, you should consider finding a method for any utilities that you develop to use the same user table so there would only need to be one login per domain. that would be GREAT.

aloicious

for starters, is it possible (and relatively simple) to use/include/incorporate the vanilla sessions on separate pages? btw... using vanilla as the basis for my band's site... hoping to build a blog and a event/gig guide to tie in, maybe as extensions, maybe simply a mess of customisations...

Mark

aloicious: maybe this will shed some light on your question:

How Vanilla builds pages

chimaira

i planning to do exactly the same thing for my band's site. it's all very well trying to build our own extensions, etc. but an official release of some kind of blog would be awesome.

Mark

I'd love to develop a blog. Anyone want to give me 50 grand?

ChrisGwynne

I'll give you 50cents

vinay

Mark, I'd love to help. Once I understand how the vanilla core works, I'd love to help. I did a decent amount of tinkering with txp, enough ot know how I want a blog to work, and what I think is wrong with that. I've got a few template classes floating around.

I'd be glad to toss them your way.

stuart

I think you could easily make something you could charge for. Charge $5, get 10,000 downloads and theres your 50k. Im pretty sure the community is waiting for the sucsessors to txp/wp/mt to come along, and I am willing to bet they will behaviour in the same way as vanilla does.

vinay

Hell I'd pay $5 for some serious blogging software.

@stuart
The problem with asking people to pay for software is that they expect support. And I'm sure mark can't support it, not all by himself. But people will expect support whether they pay $1 or $100. And that sucks.

No. I think that once the vanilla core is settled into 1.0, we should start taking it apart and putting it back together to make some blog software. I've got various html_template code lying around, that I can use (when I wrote my own photo thing, I wrote like 5 different html template classes). We've got an awesome user/and interface engine here for the backend. it'd simply be a matter of extended it a little bit (I think). and putting together some of the parts differently.

I think Mark would be happy to help us learn the code, but certainly I don't think he has the time or the energy right now to write the code himself.

dom

The code required to extend Vanilla into a blog would (I think) be fairly minimal easy to write. The only major obstacle is locking starting discussions in certain categories to certain roles, and then you just make a category named "blog" and only let whoever you want blogging to start em. After that, anyone can respond, and hey presto, you have a blog. Just pull out all blog posts and slap em on a front page.

Of course, that wouldn't provide the multiple classification tagging that we've grown so used to with blogs, but, is it absolutely necessary? And to be honest, I'd love to see a feature like multiple tagging used in Vanilla anyway, sort of as a social experiment to see how it works!

vinay

Well, let's turn this thread into what we think we can do with vanilla in order to turn it into a blog. You're right i think the code required would not be minimal, but certainly easy to write.

I would definitely prefer tagging. The other thing I'd like to do is create more options for roles for finer grained control.

In my opinion, the trick with any blog is the output. I think Vanilla would make an awesome backend, but I want to be able to style my output completely with the help of templates. I'd prefer if vanilla wasn't the front end as well (if you kind of get what I'm talking about).

lament

how about.. not a blog in the traditional sense, but posting into a specified forum that only admins can create topics for (or give roles to), and that topic showing up as a blog entry on the front page of a site. in the forum itself, if people post comments into it, then on the front page it will show "35 comments" and when they click that, it takes them to the forum posting with all the comments.

that make sense?

actually punbb has this and i thought it was pretty cool. check punbb.org's front page.

vinay

yeah, that makes sense. but then I think it can be mostly done now with very very very little work. I was thinking more of a ..uh..slightly more full featured and slightly more traditional..blogging software.

I.E. Move it towards blogging, rather than have blogging me a forum. get my drift?

lament

got it.. i'll take my idea to the extension forum..

dom

@lament: Yes, that's what I was trying to get at. I figure it is relatively easy to pull off. @vinay: I definitely would want it to have its own output, not the same as the forum. Especially since I'd want the first comment in the "blog" discussion to show up in full, and then a link to the comments taking you to the full discussion in the forum (which anyone can comment in). So it would be fully styleable with CSS, as Vanilla is.

Mark

You guys think I should sell software? If you think you'd buy it, I'll write it. I'd have a lot to figure out, but I'm already developing it for free. I'd just develop it on my own time, and then release it for money. I'd take the money coming in and put it back into support. Of course it wouldn't be a release like Vanilla - with documentation coming after the fact, and it would have thorough bug-testing pre-release. But I'd be up for it if you guys thought you'd buy it. but I'm drunk. I need to sober up and come back to reality.

omfg

Mark: Six Apart started out by giving software away for free, now look at them, they are huge, they just bought LiveJournal. I think the popularity of this forum software should be enough indication of what's up.

sauceruney

the thing is, Mark, you don't have to write a "blog"... you've done most of the work already in this forum User's posts could show up in their profile like a personal blog for the LJ types. The owner/admins posts are aggregated into the themed blog or blogs they're building their community around. Things like link managers could be extensions, and comment spam should be minimal to nonexistent due to the sign-up process.