Blog

What is Blog?

The Blog extension allows creating news feeds on the wiki. These news feeds can be shown on any page, and users can be allowed to add their own news.

Where can I find the blog function?

By default, there is a link to the Blog page in the TopMenuBar, which then opens the blog, a page containing a form for writing a new blog entry and a list of previous entries.

This blog news feed can be displayed on any wiki page by adding the blog tag to the page.

This also displays a  "Create new blog entry"-form on the page, unless it is disabled to use blog tag attributes.

A blog entry consists of a title, revision information (date and author of first revision), the entry itself and possibly links for comments and a permalink.

If a blog entry is too long, the link "continue reading" is displayed.

Write an entry or create a new entry

As described above, new blog entries can be created through the form on the page containing a blog tag, on Blog special page (Special:Blog), or by directly creating new pages in the Blog namespace.

Blog tags

Blog extension offers several tags. These tags can be added to a page using InsertMagic functionality, or writing tag syntax directly to wiki code editor.

Wiki tag	Description
<bs:blog />	Displays blog news feed on the page. It can be extended with multiple attributes. For more on attubutes read section "Blog tag attibutes" below.
<bs:blog:more />	This tag should be placed inside the content of a blog entry (pages in Blog namespace) to define at which point in text "continue reading" link should be placed. This will override default cut-off length of an entry.
<bs:blog:time time="YYYYMMDDHHmm" />	This tag also should be placed inside the content of a blog entry. It allows manually defining timestamp for that particular blog entry. Timestamp is used in sorting and displaying blog entries.

Creating a second blog

As described the default blog feed consists of "normal" wiki pages stored in the Blog namespace. Other blog feeds can exist in addition to this feed, and they can be defined by category.
For example, the category "Company news" can be designated for a second blog. In that case all pages in this category will be considered entries of this blog and will be displayed on page as blog entries. By adding  <bs:blog /> tag to the page, attribute "cat" must be set to "Company news"  like  <bs:blog cat="Company news" />

Another option is to designate a namespace for this purpose. Using example from above, namespace "Company news" must be created and all pages inside this namespace (Company news:News1, Company news:News2) will be considered blog entries.  The syntax that should be used for the blog tag in this case is: <bs:blog ns="Company news" />

Keep in mind that when blog tags with "cat"  or "ns" are used, all pages from that category/namespace will be shown, so those categories/namespaces should be used for that purpose only.

<bs:blog /> attributes

The following tag arguments can be used with the tag <bs:blog />:

Attribute	Description	Value
count	Number of blog entries to be displayed.	number
cat	Category from which to show pages as blog entries	category name
ns	Namespace from which to show pages as blog entries	namespace name or ID
newentryfield	Should "Create new blog entry" be shown?	0 or 1
newentryfieldposition	Position of the "Create new blog entry" form.	"bottom" or "top"
renderimages	Should images be displayed	0 or 1
maxchars	Number of characters that should be shown before the "Continue reading" link is shown.	number

Default values for these attributes for the whole wiki can be set in the global BlueSpice preferences. See section "Configuration" below.

Configuration

Many default parameters for this extension can be configured on Special:BlueSpicePreferences, under section "Blog".

Setting	Description	Default value
Display pictures as	Defines how should images in blog entries be handled. There are three options: full (image will be shown in full size), thumb (image will be shown as a thumb) and none	thumb
Number of words per entry	How many words to allow in the blog post before "continue reading" is shown	1000
Open new window for read more	Should full version of the blog entry, once "continue reading" is clicked, be opened in same or new tab/window	false
Position for the new blog entry form	Whether to show create new form on top or bottom of the page
Show all entries link		true
Show information about the entry		true
Number of blog entries	Number of blog entries to show per page	10
Show new blog entry form	Should "Create new blog entry" form be shown	true
Show permalink link	Should permanent link to blog entry be shown	true
Sort by	Should blog entries be sorted by creation time or by title	creation
Text flow: Image position	Position of the image in the blog entry, right, left or none	right

Rights (permissions)

This extension introduces new permission "blog-viewspecialpage" that allows users who have it to access Special:Blog

Requirements

Blog requires BlueSpice Foundation.

Tips for working with blogs

Put a link to the blog in the left hand navigation menu. Then your colleagues will be able to find the blog whenever they want.