MR: Weblog 2.0 | Weblog II Beta Site

Weblog 2.0
Internet groupware development platform
Weblog II Beta Site

Weblog 2.0

Channels:

User Guide

Macro List
  Outline Form

Discussion:
  Search
  Recent Topics
  Recent Messages
  Post a Message

See Also:
  Macrobyte Resources
  AttSearchEngine
  RCSearch
  Formz
  Queue Suite
  TLS

Welcome!
Signup
Logon
Subscribe to email
Unsubscribe from email
Post Message

<-- Back One Week

7/21/2007

Newsletters From Weblogs? What? Yes, Really.

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 11:17 AM)

We have a new feature about 95% complete in Conversant's Weblog II pages.

Officially, the feature is for sending newsletters from your weblog. Newsletters are just collections of the posts to your weblog in a given period of time (such as the last week or month). They're sent by email to an address you specify (such as a mailing list on another server).

I've been told that this newsletter feature will be useful to more than just the person who originally requested it. (I can see it being used, for example, in an office, or educational setting, or open source project.)

Possibly the best part of it, though, is the interface used for creating the newsletters in the first place. You choose templates from popup menus, and the "live preview" of the newsletter updates immediately. So, this could be a very useful tool when redesigning your weblog (and actually, it suggests a good way to preview changes made in the Files & Folders section of the Admin tools).

To test it out, just go to your weblog's full URL (including "index" if that's the name of your page), and add "/customize" to the end.

( My weblog is at http://www.truerwords.net/index so to use the new feature I need to visit http://www.truerwords.net/index/customize )

The one feature that doesn't work yet is actually the sending of the email. It's important to get the rest of this right first, but I plan to have that part working within a couple of days.

Any useful feedback would be appreciated. If you think the idea is goofy, please at least try it out before saying so! :-)

Seth

P.S. One technical detail: for this to work, your page template MUST include two macros in the <head> section:  (without the embed attribute, or with embed="false"), and . Also,  MUST come after the  macro. All of the default page templates are set up this way, but if you run into Javascript errors then check both of the above.

Comments: 0 | Reply | Categories:

3/6/2006

List Your Weblog's Archives by Month

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 6:44 PM)

On 2/27/06, Mike Black said:

>In my page (http://www.mindspill.org) in the main left hand navigation
>I've got a box "Archive" that's what I meant with the monthly archive list.

As I'd been planning a macro to do this anyway (for a long time, now), Mike's request gave me the push I needed to finally 'get it done'.

The macro you need is  The links produced by this macro link to the per-month archives in your weblog, and could be used instead of the full weblog calendar.

It's very flexible. By default (that is, with no attributes at all, so it looks like is shown above) it lists all of the months in which the weblog has archives. (The output is an HTML list.) The following is an example of the output (note that it's going to look weird in plain-text email, so please go to the site to see it.)

Being 'very flexible' means the macro accepts a lot of attributes. I can't write the docs right now, but here's a list of those attributes it supports:

channel
format -- date formatting *
lang -- date formatting *
timezoneName -- date formatting *
preText ( <ul>)
postText (</ul>)
noValueText (empty string)
preWrapper ( <li>)
postWrapper (</li>)
separator
outputFormat
descending -- should the list go up or down, chronologically?
links -- should the output include links?
limit -- restrict the output to the last /limit/ items

* These three are for formatting the dates that are output by the macro, like "March, 2006". See the docs on formatting dates in Conversant.

This is a brand-new macro. If you find something difficult, or can't figure out how to do something, or run into a bug... please report it here on the beta site!

Seth

Comments: 20 | Reply | Categories:

1/4/2006

Template Changes

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 12:09 PM)

I've made some changes to some templates in weblog II. There's a new template called "Weblog Item Full RSS READONLY" which offers a rich set of features for the item element in an RSS feed: title, [new] creator name (NOT email address), [new] trackback ping url, link field, date published, unique id and permalink, comments url, category tags, and the full message body.

If you're using a custom RSS item template, then you could just use the new template as an example if you'd like to update it. (I'm especially interested in seeing everyone support the category tags and the dc:creater tag, they're both quite useful for a new plugin coming out soon.)

The Weblog Wrapper RSS READONLY template was changed. It now includes two "namespace" declarations in the RSS element, like this:

<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">

Again, if you're using a custom rss wrapper template, and you plan to use the "dc:creator" tag/element in your RSS feed, then you should update your wrapper template with the xmlns:dc attribute. (Just to make sure you're serving valid XML.)

Finally, you should be very excited about the new plugin coming out soon, even though I'm not going to tell you about it yet. ;-)

Comments: 0 | Reply | Categories: