The weblog/edit pages should now be functional. I hope everything's working correctly, since I'm exhausted and am not going to work on it any more tonight.

Everything should be working: custom templates at the day and item level, changing an items day and/or date, and I even decided to leave the subject editor in there (and I may add a category editor before we're done). You should also be able to move items around within a day and remove items with the red "X".

---

IMPORTANT NOTE: when new weblogs are created, the plugins will make sure that there are three custom fields in the conversation. Since your weblogs are already created, you have to do it yourself. Create these three fields, if they don't already exist (we'll be more flexible later, allowing you to choose different fields, but you need these three for now):

• weblogSummary - long text field
• weblogCategories - List/Combo Box field
• weblogItemLink - short text field

---

Please report any breakage here, and I'll fix it tomorrow afternoon.

Once all the breakage is fixed (I'm sure there will be some), the basic weblog features are complete and I can start rolling out some of the fun stuff. ;-)

Seth

The /edit page is on the servers, but it doesn't yet do anything. It should be working by the end of the day.

To see it, just add /edit to your weblog's basic URL. If your weblog is a directory's default page, you must include the name of the page in the URL (ie, /index/edit, not just /edit).

If you're not logged in, or you aren't the owner of the weblog, you'll get a 403 (Not Authorized) error. You can see what I mean by going to this URL:

<http://internal.macrobyte.net/weblog2beta/index/edit>

There is some javascript and CSS used by the editor, which should go in the HTML's HEAD section. There are other things which could/should go in the HEAD section, too (like LINK tags for pointing to the RSS feed, and possibly even next/prev/top LINK tags for paging through the archives).

To keep it simple, you just need to put one macro in your template's head area, and Weblog 2 will use it for whatever it needs.

<!--#weblog.header-->

The editor is still usable if you leave out this macro, but it's ugly and may generate javascript errors.

Seth

I'd like a checkbox-generating macro to *remove* a message from a weblog. Why? For those times (I know I'll have them) when I want to remove a message from multiple blogs.

Attached to this message you'll find a mockup of the Weblog Editor UI. To see it, just download and unzip the file, then open "editor/index.html" in your browser.

The Editor should be functional by the end of this weekend, based on this mockup.

This UI is not final. I want to replace the buttons in the left hand column with icons... preferably REALLY simple icons, something standard. (If anybody wants to help, I'm looking for one (or two) color, mostly-transparent GIF's. Icons which can take on color when the mouse is pointing at them, but which can also have a "disabled" state for those items which are not available for any reason (see the mockup, you'll know what I'm talking about.)

The "(i)" links should also be icons. Just can't find what I'm looking for... something like a very small question mark or lower case "i" in a circle, same style as the other icons.

This UI is NOT going to be editable by the webloggers, so what you see here is very close to what you'll get. No editable templates, and we're not going to use your wrapper, day, or item templates because they might be configured in a way which would leave the Editor interface unusable.

There's at least one thing about this mockup that I expect to generate questions. At least I'll know if anybody's actually looked at it...

Comments appreciated, questions are welcome.

Seth

The old weblog calendar had an awful lot of HTML in it for very little in the way of content.Each cell had its td tag with a rather long class attribute, and then the contents of each cell was wrapped in a span tag to control the look of the text.

There were corresponding entries in the default stylesheets to control the look of the calendar cells.

To make matters more interesting, we had separate classes for Sunday cells and Sunday text, weekday cells and text, and Saturday cells and text.

The default templates for Weblog II calendars do not include these text classes, but all of the cell classes are still there. The text classes were unnecessarily redundant. To get the very same effect, just move or copy the stylesheet info for the text classes into the cell classes. The following examples are based on the Winter stylesheet.

Before:

.calendarCurrentDayCell{

	background-color:#FFFFCC;

	}

.calendarCurrentDayText{

	font-size:75%;

	color:#CE0000;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarCurrentViewText{

	font-size:75%;

	}

.calendarDayCell{

	background-color:whitesmoke;

	}

.calendarDayText{

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:black;

	}

.calendarHeaderCell{

	background-color:slategray;

	}

.calendarHeaderText{

	font-size:90%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:#FFFFFF;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarPrevNextCell{ }

.calendarPrevNextText{

	font-size:80%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarSaturdayCell{

	background-color:gainsboro;

	}

.calendarSaturdayText{

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:slategray;

	}

.calendarSubHeaderCell{

	background-color:lightsteelblue;

	}

.calendarSubHeaderText{

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:#FFFFFF;

	}

.calendarSundayCell{

	background-color:lightgrey;

	}

.calendarSundayText{

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:slategray;

	}

.calendarTable{

	background-color:white;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	}

After:

.calendarCurrentDayCell{

	background-color:#FFFFCC;

	font-size:75%;

	color:#CE0000;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarCurrentViewText{

	font-size:75%;

	}

.calendarDayCell{

	background-color:whitesmoke;

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:black;

	}

.calendarHeaderCell{

	background-color:slategray;

	font-size:90%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:#FFFFFF;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarPrevNextCell{

	font-size:80%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	font-weight:bold;

	}

.calendarSaturdayCell{

	background-color:gainsboro;

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:slategray;

	}

.calendarSubHeaderCell{

	background-color:lightsteelblue;

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:#FFFFFF;

	}

.calendarSundayCell{

	background-color:lightgrey;

	font-size:75%;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	color:slategray;

	}

.calendarTable{

	background-color:white;

	font-family:Geneva, Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial;

	}

There's still a lot more that could be done to shrink these stylesheets (the fonts don't need to be specified everywhere), but the point of this example is simply to show you what's needed to make your weblog calendars look right again, now that the span tags have been removed.

Earlier I said that you must create a custom field called "weblogLink". That was incorrect. The name of this short text field is "weblogItemLink".

My apologies. You can't rename a custom field, either, so you'll have to delete it and create another (which is easy enough, thankfully).

On 11/21/02, Mark Morgan said:

>Preview works normally, with one caveat: it deselects the checked
>weblog, and you have to remember to check it after preview before
>posting it.

The weblog checkboxes now maintain their state when after previewing and "updating" messages (via the enclosure button).

Seth

In most weblogging software, weblog items can have a specific link (a URL) associated with them. This hasn't been true with Conversant, because the weblog plugin didn't have real support for custom fields.

This has changed. (Big surprise, huh?)

When you create a Weblog II page (from now on), a new custom field is created called "weblogLink", if the field doesn't already exist. This will be a protected field (you can't delete it), though at this time it is not.

WARNING: if you already have a weblog II page, you must create this shortText field, at /admin/conversations/yourconv/custom+fields

Along with this new field comes a change to the weblog.item.link macro, and changes to all of the Weblog Item templates.

The weblog.item.link macro looks for the value in this field. If the field has no value, it returns the url of the message instead, so it will ALWAYS return something.

Also, unless you set the urlOnly attribute of this macro to false, it will return a link to the item's subject/title.

In Edit Mode:

• The macro can (and should) be used in your message editing templates. When in edit mode, it acts exactly like the msgCustomField macro, and uses all of the same attributes (so you can set the size, class, id, style, etc.).

• It will only use the value of the weblogItemLink field, it doesn't show the url of the message. So if the database field is empty, the HTML field will be empty.

• Also when in edit mode, this macro will automatically label the field with "Weblog Link: ". You can change that with the labelText attribute.

• The macro will eventually only run for members who have the ability to post to at least one weblog, but for now it will be shown to everyone.

I'll be out for awhile this evening, but please feel free to test this feature and let me know if you have any problems. Next up is the newMessageForm-related functionality.

You can now put the #weblog.AddToWeblogForm macro in your message editing templates. I recommend putting it directly under the #msgBody macro, like this:

<!--#msgBody--><br clear="all" />
<!--#weblog.addToWeblogForm-->

When you create a new message (or edit an existing message), you'll see the checkboxes for adding the message to your weblog(s). If you check any of them, the message will be added to the selected weblogs when the message is submitted.

If you only post to one weblog, the browser will be redirected there instead of to the message page. I haven't tested yet with multiple weblogs. It should work, but you'll probably just be sent to the message page as if nothing had happened with the weblogs. (That can be fixed later, now that the basic functionality is there.)

Can you help test this, tonight? The next few features all build on it, so I need to know it's working correctly. Let me know if anything could be better, or doesn't work at all, or even doesn't work as you'd expect.

Thanks!

Here's my to-do list for Weblog 2.0 over the next week. If things go faster than I expected, the list will obviously have to grow. Some of these items have to happen in the order they're listed, as they build on something earlier in the list.

Render List Fields as Checkboxes

Add ability to render "List/Combo Box" fields as a series of checkboxes. Checkboxes are much, much friendlier than select fields, and they can be rendered as a horizontal list which makes them more compatible with most site designs. Should have done this a LONG time ago.

Anyway, this is done. If you already have a "List/Combo Box" field in use, you can render it as checkboxes by adding the renderAs attribute to your msgCustomField macro, like this: <!--#msgCustomField fieldName="myListField" renderAs="checkbox"-->

Add Weblog Features to "New Thread" (Message Creation) Forms

When creating a new message, you'll be able to click on checkboxes for the weblogs it should be added to after the message is posted. You won't have to post a message to the site and then post it to the weblog, it can all be done in one step.

Support for Posting New Messages Directly to Weblogs

This is the feature Duncan was asking about. There will be full support for posting messages directly to weblogs, such as with the old Weblogs. All the stuff that can be done with a NewThread form will be supported here, too. Other surprises are being considered, things which will make this extremely easy to use (like support for a popup, stay-open window for posting to your weblog).

#Weblog.NewMessageForm Macro

Once Weblog 2.0 supports direct posting, it's time to get the macro working.

---

This is by no means a complete list of what's going into this plugin, but it's probably all that I'll manage to get done this week.

Obviously, we need an /edit page for the weblogs. I'll get to that as soon as I can, it may end up on this week's list.

The RSS feed for a weblog is found by simply tacking "/rss" after the name of the weblog in the URL.

So, this:

http://internal.macrobyte.net/weblog2beta/index

...becomes this:

http://internal.macrobyte.net/weblog2beta/index/rss

Channels each have their own RSS feeds, by default. This is essentially a knowledge management feature (more on that later, if you don't understand). So this:

http://internal.macrobyte.net/weblog2beta/index/channel/hints

...becomes this:

http://internal.macrobyte.net/weblog2beta/index/rss/channel/hints

The #weblog.newMessageForm doesn't do anything useful yet.

When it's done -- hopefully in a couple days -- there will be two changes worth noting:

First, the new message form will be a message template, and will in fact work almost exactly like the msgNewThreadForm macro.

Second, message editing forms will gain support for a new macro which will work like the #weblog.addToWeblogForm macro: when editing a message, you'll be able to click on checkboxes to specify which weblogs the message should be posted to (and of course, you'll only see checkboxes for blogs you control). After you submit the message, the weblogs will be updated automatically.

There's a third change, but it's not directly related to the weblog.newMessageForm macro, so I'll save that one for a surprise.

One macro you need immediately in order to use the weblog at all:

<!--#weblog.addToWeblogForm-->

Put this this macro in your message template (it works anywhere that a message number is in context). You'll get a form that looks like this:

(Your form might not be that pretty, of course. Depends on your browser and operating system.)

The weblog2beta site is up and running.

Please post all questions, comments, feature reqeusts, and bug reports here.