How to set up Xaraya as a blogging tool?

As blogging has found its way to our developers it's perhaps time to show
off what xaraya can do in that respect.

The module which is as the central axis for blogging is webservices, so
start  by activating that module.

The following other modules will play a role in setting up a blogging site:

- articles : storage of the blog blips
- categories: categorisation of blogs
- comments : commenting on the blog articles

Those three should be activated as well.

So far so good, now for the blog specific configuration.

If you want a specific blogging site, i suggest clearing all categories an
make a nice hierarchy suitable for the blogs you want to hold on your site.

While not necessary, it might be advisable to create a specific publication
type in the articles configuration for the blogs. This allows to use the
site first for blogging only but add other types of content later on. For
simplicity reasons I'll assume we'll use the "news" publication type for
now.

With the categories hierarchy in place we need to tell that these categories
need to be used by the articles module. This is done by activating the
categories hook for articles. Go to the modules administration, menuitem
configure hooks and check articles on the categories hook functionality.
While you're in there click comments and check articles for that hook as
well. This will allow commenting on the blog postings.

Now we've hooked up both comments and categories to the articles module we
need to specify the categories to be used for the blog postings. In the
articles configuration go to the publication types config. On the bottom of
the page there is a category selection part (thanks to the hooks we enabled
earlier). I suggest you take the top level categories in which you want to
allow blog postings. 

The final step we need to take is link the webservices module to the
specific publication type. Go to the webservices module config and select
the publication type (in our example "news") to use for the blogger api.

The basic configuration to get it working on the xaraya side is now done.
Obviously you can continue by:
- creating a specific publication type which is targeted specifically for
blog postings, adapting the fields and the templates for it
- create a theme or override the module templates for the mentioned modules
to make it better suited to blogging specifically.
- fine tune roles and privileges to set up multi user blogging, for example
restricting certain users to certain categories.


The second part is hooking up a blogging client. I use mozblog
(mozblog.mozdev.org) for blogging. For each blogging client there is
basically one setting which is specific to the server: where to send the
postings?

The url which the blog client needs is:

http://your.xarayaserver.com/ws.php?type=xmlrpc

Most of the time you can also enter:
username: your account on the xaraya installation
password: matching password
Optional:
blogid: not used in xaraya install, we do this dynamically ;-)
appkey: not used in xaraya, for now, we might do it later to support
specific clients programs in more advanced ways

With the required parameters it should work. When you register the server in
your blogging client it should pull down the relevant categories in which
you can post your blog snippets.

With most blog clients you can post/edit and delete blog postings. I've
tested this all with mozblog and except for some glitches it works pretty
well. Posts appear in the selected category and get the status "submitted"
after which the site admin can either "approve" or "frontpage" them.

Hope this helps.

marcel

PS
Working on trackback, could use some help with it. The modules part has been
mostly done by gregor, i think the RDF is in place, so we basically only
need to adapt the webservices modules to accept POST requests for incoming
ping and send POST requests to other websites to get trackback up and
running.


-- 
Marcel van der Boom, HS-Development BV
Kwartiersedijk 14B, 4893 RE
Fijnaart, The Netherlands
T: +31-168-468822, F: +31-168-468823