Creating shared, corporate or groupal blogs with the new Blogs Aggregator portlet

We finally have a corporate blog! We had been talking about doing this for a long time and finally we've had the time to make the the necessary improvements to Liferay to make this possible.

As part of these improvements we have two new portlets, the Recent Bloggers portlet and the Blogs Aggregator portlet. The former allows showing a list of the latest users of the portal (more on this below) that have written a post entry. The latter shows the latest posts themselves from all the posts and exposes an aggregated RSS feed.

Allowing aggregation of blogs is a feature that I've wanted Liferay to have since I used that feature in a Drupal based website (www.agile-spain.com). It was great to be able to have individual blogs and at the same time a unified blogs for all of them. But the Drupal implementation has the problem that you have to aggregate all the blogs, not only some of them. While that's reasonable for small website, it's not for the large portals with thousands of users that are often created with Liferay. So when creating the Blogs Aggregator portlet for Liferay we've leveraged the organizations infrastructure to allow for the needed flexibility. Through the configuration screen of the Blogs Aggregator it's possible to select any of the existing organization to limit the bloggers that are aggregated to only those that belong (explicitly) to that organization.

That gives a great amout of flexibility! For example, if Liferay is used within an Intranet (often one of the most complex scenarios) it would be possible to have a shared blog for the people in the Sales department, another for those in Engineering, etc. by creating an organization for each of them. Sure, the blogs portlet is still lacking some features, but this flexibility of creating shared blogs is one that I haven't seen in any other blog system. And now that we are using it in liferay.com you can only expect the blogs portlet to keep improving rapidly.

As a final note, I'd like to publically thank Germinus for their sponsorship of this portlet.

6 Comments

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Jorge,

Hope it's ok for a non-liferayer to comment here.
I think your collaborate instincts are great. Love this portlet! The selectivity of some, vs all, is a great improvement over drupal (I always disliked that project, feeling it very slow, as well as overdesigned where things didn't matter, and underdesigned where it did).

I would find it very useful if I could customize the Recent Blog posts even further. Like being able to configure for "all recent" or just "MyBloggers": those bloggers I want to follow closely. Default settings are a must, but "mini tabs" in the UI would let me easily see ALL, or just the facets (of those included) that I like. In a large blogspace, this would be very important. There are entire divisions of some enterprises who never talk to each other, so being able to sub-filter would be very handy indeed.

Kudos

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Hi Matte,

It's not only ok for you to comment, but it's appreciated. The more feedback we all give as Liferay users the better it'll become.

Regarding your suggestion .. it's actually a very good idea. If I understood well you'd like to use the portlet in the private pages of your personal community to keep up to date with the blogs of certain users of the system.

The Blogs Aggregator was originally thought with a different idea in mind, which is publishing a corporate blog, so I had never thought of this myself. Thanks a lot for the idea emoticon

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Jorge,

Happy to be useful. I've been frustrated for years by people who don't actually use the tools they are designing. You clearly participate, so I think you "get" a lot of things many programmers would not care to think about. I sense that a lot around Liferay, and it shows. It's increasingly why I am feeling comfortable about my team's descision to come this far. We are still not 100% committed to Liferay for our entire project, but resistance is falling away fast with a few weeks of experience with the community, and particularly.. you.

As for the blog, a few annoying things.

1) No reply button in each comment, requiring user to scroll back to an indeterminant place (comment tab, whose position is determined by content length). This could be fixed with either a comments() count link doubling as a reply action, or a separate reply button (beside "top").

2) It is becoming almost standard now, for blog comments to be threaded. Perhaps it's here, and not yet implemented? If you need examples of blogs with good threaded comments, see HuffingtonPost, DailyKos, etc. It becomes more forum like, but that is in fact what a good blog should often do: Inspire a discussion (at which point the comment thread becomes a forum.)

3) In blogs, the Author link only seems to appear for Liferay staff (you, for instance). It would be nice if the user could have an option on their profile, which could be overriden by the portal manager, to 1) Author Link displays this profile, or.. (2) displays your blog (when available). Some admins will want to force this, depending on how site is being used. Then, on the blog, the author link can change action, to display the actual profile. Then, the only thing missing is private messaging with the blogger (but I repeat myself) emoticon

I posted this here, because I am assume you are designing the blog. What else are you primarily responsible for? It will help me decide what to post, and to whom. Come to think of it, a Wiki page about the Liferay developer's roles might really help development in the community. If it exists, I missed it.

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Oh.. one more thing. The thing I originally began posting, forgot, and could not add....

AN "EDIT POST" button on each comment. Just because it's a comment, doesn't mean mistakes or addendums aren't to be made, eh?

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Hi Matte,

Many of the features you request for the blogs comments where available until... yesterday. Brian decided to make some simplifications to the functionality in order to make the comments better looking and easier to read. I actually like them more now, but I understand that some people may miss some of those features.

The only thing that has never been available is the link in the name and I like the idea. I'll add that to my TODO list.

Thanks again for your interest and suggestions.

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Not sure I understand that reasoning, but perhaps I need to see that past implementation to see where the problem was. Some of he biggest blogs on the net have threaded comments, and don't require the user to navigate back to the top of them just to post one. At worst, they also add a "quick reply" at the bottom. Of course, as with most of these things, not all blogs would want them, or should have them. But feel they are very appropriate for technical topics where there can be a lot of threaded back-and-forth that can become very unwieldy with linear comments.

Sometimes, when it comes to default behaviors, perhaps the best thing to do is decide with a poll that has links to two alternative demos or screen shots. Trust the community, and all that.

Can I assume that the threaded comments are available to my implemtation of liferay? If so, I will ask my folks to do set it up that way when they get time, I will tweak it, and we can look at my version.

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