Features

Information

This documents the major features of the blogwow tool. The goal of this page is to explain what the tool actually does and avoid issues related to assumptions about what a blog is.

Features

  • The Blog
    • The main page for the app includes a list of all the blogs in the current site
    • Users create a blog in a Sakai site automatically by simply access the blog tool
      • Permissions control whether the blog is created or not
    • Users can edit the profile of each blog to include information about themselves
      • Profiles can contain html and are creating using the richtext editor
      • User can also provide an image URL, this image will be displayed with the profile text
      • This text and image will appear on the right hand side of the view which displays their blog entries
  • Entries
    • Users can create blog entries in their own blog
      • Entries can contain html and are creating using the richtext editor
        • Text entered is run through a cleaner to remove harmful tags
      • Blog entries can be public, group visible, instructor only, and private
      • Entries store the time/date they are created
    • Entries are only shown if the user has permission to view them
    • The list of entries pages so that a limited number appear at once
  • Comments
    • Plain text comments can be made on entries
      • All text is escaped so no harmful tags can be used
      • Comment can be made by authorized Sakai users, public comments not currently allowed
    • Comments can be removed by a site administrator with appropriate permissions
  • RSS feeds
    • Links for RSS feeds are available on the main page with the list of blogs
      • RSS includes links back to the blog and to the individual entries
    • Public (anonymous) access to RSS feeds for individual blogs or all blogs for a site is provided
      • Human readable URLs are used
  • Sakai
    • One click access from the main page for all actions
    • Uses RSF so templates are easy to customize
    • Fine grained permissions control in Sakai
      • There are 7 permissions available for controlling access to various parts of the blog (creating entries, creating comments, etc.)
    • All pages fully internationalized (I18n)
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  1. Jul 06, 2007

    Mike Osterman says:

    I don't see this in the screen shots, so I thought best to record here. Will th...

    I don't see this in the screen shots, so I thought best to record here.

    Will there be a comprehensive display of all a site's blogs at once? This would be an additional view that would show all users' blog posts together in the general format of the "Viewing a blog" screenshot. Perhaps the blogger's profile could be condensed (name and picture) and put in the heading of the post.

    1. Jul 08, 2007

      John Norman says:

      In thinking about this, we should be aware of thinking in the OSP community such...

      In thinking about this, we should be aware of thinking in the OSP community such as:

      http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/OSPDOC/Blog+Portfolio

  2. Sep 26

    Jason Shao says:

    Is BlogWow still under active development, or effectively on hold?

    Is BlogWow still under active development, or effectively on hold?

    1. Sep 27

      Clay Fenlason says:

      It is still being actively maintained, it has committers from three institutions...

      It is still being actively maintained, it has committers from three institutions, and I'm aware of it in production at some half-dozen schools. Its features are slowly but surely being fleshed out. Aaron created an RC1 just recently (version 0.9.9), on Sept. 10.

      Since August, for example, I see the following commits:

      • http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/BW-67
        Added in event support for all writes
      • BW-68 fix search method
      • BW-69 validate the input for a new blog entry to check that title and text are supplied. It was nessasary to fix the alert messsages to do this
      • BW-72 catch empty comments
      • Creating RC1