Bundle4Blog

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Summary: How to use PmWiki as a blogging engine.

Version:

Prerequisites: PmWiki version: 2 and some of the recipes listed below

Status:

Maintainer:

Categories: Bundles, Blog

Questions answered by this recipe

How can I use PmWiki as a blogging engine?

Description

Here are some places to find the features you may associate with blogs:

To add formatted comments to a page, see CommentBox, Comments, or perhaps AddDeleteLine. More features for visitors to add comments to edit-protected pages are coming in the PmWiki 2.2 series -- stay tuned.

For email notifications, see MailPosts. This may be combined with AddDeleteLine for people to self subscribe/unsubscribe for notifications?

PmWiki comes with RSS feeds built-in, including feeds with summaries & podcasting/enclosures.

For related pages, see Categories. This includes information on tagging/categorizing pages. For backlinks see Backlinks.

To allow easier tagging of pages, see TagPages. When comments are available for edit-protected pages, it will probably include tagging for visitors of a website.

For a tag cloud see Tags. If you're using [[!Category]] as tags (as in TagPages recipe above), see ListCategories instead.

Pingbacks see Pingback.

To allow visitors to rate pages/entries, see PageRank.

Pm ? said several times that he's looking at making pmwiki (more) blog-friendly and would work on a recipe if only he knew a set of key features people would agree on as essential for blogging.

What Radu can suggest for now is that you do a search on the pmwiki.org site with the keyword blog.

Take a look at the PITS entries returned, since PITS is the mechanism currently used to keep track of user interest in current and proposed development. Maybe you can comment on some of them, or at least vote for the features you'd be interested in.
Under Profiles, you can probably find users interested in blogging.

And so on.

If you're interested in blogging, please try to update this page whenever you find something relevant to blogging.

Notes

Release Notes

Comments

Brilliant to see this issue being raised again. It seems that 'thom' hacked wikicalendar a fair amount but his code is not available (as far as I could tell). See the previous discussiong at PITS.00028. I'm very interested in using PmWiki as a more flexible Blog engine. --Tom

Well, I spoke to Thomas and got a copy of his hacked version of the wikicalendar. A description is in PITS.00028 and the file is here: wikicalendar-TWhack.tar.gz Δ --Tom

I like to see a feature, to send e-mails to pmwiki, so pmwiki could be used as a help desk. There is a recipe for V1 (Cookbook-V1/MakeWikiPage), but with a invalid script link. --PatrickOgay

PatrickOgay: There has been discussion of creating a recipe or feature to allow email-to-wiki. That feature may come up in the PmWiki 2.2 series.

The PITS entry for blog is frozen, so I will post my comments here, as I already wrote them...

Blog and Wiki are two systems to make it easy to write in websites. The difference is that a wiki has more power in it`s pages and a blog has some extra features that automatically manage the content, that is, date-oriented listing, sometimes categories and other stuff, and the "new entry form" page as oposed to first making a link to a page and then editing the page.

Well, as I see it, PmWiki allready has some sorts of automatic content organization, as the "RecentChanges" page and search. I think "Blog functionality the PmWiki way" could be achieved with some beefed up page listing directives (one for just a list of the entries, other for entries and first n lines, and other for complete posts). The same filtering mechanisms that already exist for page listing directives should be present in those listings. The listings should be organizable by either page creation date, modification date, or page name, this way the date handling could be done in a flexible way, either as part of the filename or the file system. Categories could be easily based on this sort of things.

Now the "new page entry form" is just a page editing form with automatic name generation. It might be another directive (:newentryform:) that could be put in any page, but I think it should be an action (?action=newentry). There are arguably many ways to make this, it think the best way would be to have a text-input thinguie for "page title", and combo-boxes for day, month and year, and how the engine transforms those things in pagenames controlled by options.

Well, just an idea...

MarcioRPS (from www.yuy.com.br)

Heeey! Speaking of the "RecentChanges" page gives me...

An Idea

I believe the biggest problem trying to use flat-file based Wiki (like PmWiki is) as a blog is with date-sorted page listing, especially on the main page (thus being most often visited, and generating terrible server load if done with simple 'searches'). But as with RecentChanges, this page could be only a copy! When you add a new blog-entry, the blogging module engine would copy the page onto, say, 'Blog.Blog', and remove the oldest entry from the page (it'd be recognised with a special markup inserted to separte the entries).

Second thing would be the archives, but here I believe they're much smaller a problem, not being viewed sooo often. So here that could be done even with the existing category mechanism. Still, improvements are possible and I think much easier to be implemented:

the blogging module would add either a link or whole contents of an entry to a 'Blog.2006-January' page.
If the primer, the contents could be browsed with the <<|>> things (forgot their name), or
the blogging module could dump the contents of all linked-to pages on screen, when a 'Blog.2006-January'-like page is viewed.

I think that might be the way. So, who's first to implement it now? You still have some time, as I'm having hard time preparing for my exams now.

Greetz
Mateusz

Btw, I believe that'd also solve the problem of any kind of a 'Recent News' page/Yellow-Sticker-on-Main-Page or whatever. Or do you see any problems of this approach?

Second thing: I glanced at the PITS.00028, and it seems that it's not mainly NewestPagesOnTop what appears to be the main problem. Or is it? I'm confused now...

After a moment of rethinking: adding a page with a personally chosen 'publish date' (which is pointed as an issue in the PITS.00028) shouldn't prove difficult too, as special markup, which'd be needed to separate pages on the Blog.Blog page would allow for choosing any one of the entries and removing it, or reordering anything, or whatever. And a listing in 'Blog.January' page would be also easy to modify by the engine, being created in a strictly formalised way.

Why Blog.Blog ? Most would rather have the frontpage of a blog-site be / (root-index, i.e. document root of the domain), that's the whole point of the blog: Speed, and news, on the homepage. Julius

Btw, sorry for writing here and not where that should be written.
M.

Ah, and I'm very sorry if the idea was already talked about -- I know might not be the first one to have it. I have no time to browse through all the BlogBundles here now, sorry. Should that be true, please remove this text and my note on the PITS.BlogFeatures page.

M. again.

Thanks for your ideas! Don't be sorry! Here is what transpired from the recent discussion on the user list following from Pm's blog proposal (list archive). It makes it clear that Pm is developing a core pmwiki capability to add a new blog page to one or several blogtrail pages as a link back to the page, similar as it is happening now with RecentChanges, which gets populated with new links as pages change. A pagelist markup on a different page (or perhaps even the same) can display a formatted list from such an auto-generated trail page. Thus a blog homepage can be created (as well as archive and category pages etc), simply by using pagelist templates for formatting the output, for instance including the page content entirely, or just the first lines from every page.

Since this capability does not exist yet, I have been playing with the new power of pagelist and page variables and set up a blog using these here, in case you are interested. You find more explanations there. Basically it is build on ideas expressed on BlogWithPageList. - HansB January 11, 2006, at 02:52 PM

A new question on these matters: the cookbook now is full of blog alternatives, and among those it's no clear which ones one is supposed to use, and which ones are now outdated. Also, Pm said he'd be adding blogging capabilities to the pmwiki but it's no clear if it's gonna happen or if this has been cancelled before now, and now the official way to install a blog with pmwiki is using some of the bundles for blogging, as listed in the cookbook. What should I use for blogging? If I know that the blogging system Pm said he'd program will be added soon, I'd be happy to wait for it as it seemed to be a very interesting option... can anyone tell me what should / might I do, please? H.

Me too. Looking for the best option. Julius

-> Me Too. I feel as the whole platform has been "abandoned". Just in case, I have installed wordpress and it's really good as blogging engine. I think I will migrate everything to wordpress at some point because the platform is more supported ;-(

Well, I have not abandoned the concept of pmwiki for blogging. From BlogSimple I went to develop FoxBlog and I am working on an update to the latter, as it is broken right now because of improvements in Fox. If you look over FoxForum, visit my test site forum you can see what may be possible for a pmwiki blog. The pagelist is now very powerful, it all needs just to bestitched together into a nice useable and easy to instal bundle. But this page is totally out of date. It would help if people sign with the date, i.e four tildes do the trick. That would give a better idea of historical development of comments etc. HansB December 11, 2007, at 05:37 PM

Does anyone have an update on the status of adding/consolidating blog features in PmWiki? There are a huge number of recipes out there, most of which have comments acknowledging that they are partial and incomplete. I appreciate greatly all the work that everyone has done to make blogging a reality in PmWiki. Maybe this it's about time I learned php myself so I can help out with this project! But I also don't want to develop a complex recipe for something that may soon be included in the standard distribution. Any updates would be appreciated! Thanks! matt October 01, 2008, at 10:00 AM

I created a proof-of-concept (concept: that PmWiki was already able to create a viable blog) bundle of blog features back in 2008/2009 and made the pagelists, templates, comment forms, etc. needed to get a functional blog up and running. A couple features don't work (pingback & google blog ping), but that's because the recipes didn't work or because of my lack of knowledge in installing & configuring Pear (for pingback). Blogging is alive and well with PmWiki. It's a little tricky to install because it's a bundle of about 10 recipes, and it could use some updating (because some of the recipes have been updated or forked for better versions). Regardless, please take a look at XESBlog and XESBlog-Use to determine whether it will work for you. XES January 29, 2014, at 05:55 AM

Revision History

XES November 27, 2006, at 09:19 AM - updated the page to show a bunch of features->recipes. Please add more!!

Contributors

-Radu

-XES