Blog module for Zotonic

A Zotonic blog as separate module. In contrast to the default skeleton blog, this makes it easier to add a blog section to your current site.

Upon activation the module adds the blog at yoursite.com/blog/.

Installation

Zotonic >= 0.7:

    zotonic installmodule mod_blog

Zotonic <= 0.6:

    git clone https://github.com/ArthurClemens/mod_blog.git mod_blog

Activate the module in Admin > System > Modules.

Required steps

• Create a Text page named blog_home; this is used on the blog homepage (title and body text). Name the page in the advanced section on the edit page.
• Normally included in basesite: * a predicate named subject that points from article to keyword. * a predicate named author that points from article to person.

Optional steps

• For default styling, make sure that the base template includes Bootstrap CSS, for instance using the Bootstrap module.
• If you use the additional Comments module, JavaScript should be enabled in the browser.
• By default no comments are shown; activate the Comments module first.

Dispatch rules

By default, only pages with article in the URL are displayed as blog articles. But ideally a page (with page in the URL) that has the category article is displayed as a blog article as well.

To achieve this, check your dispatch rules. If possible you should remove page entries, so that page.article.tpl is correctly read to point to the blog article template.

Duplicate content

A site with multiple versions of the same content will be punished by Google. But if you enable the SEO Search Engine Optimization module, a "canonical" tag will be added to each page to point to the one "page" version. That way you don't have to worry that the same page can be accessed in 2 ways.

Customizing

You are likely to make changes to the blog layout or contents. To safeguard future updates, create changes in your own site, not in this module.

• Create a directory blog in your site. Template files in this directory will override mod_blog templates.
• Create overriding templates in this directory. For instance, copy base.tpl and add or remove sections. Or create a custom css/mod_blog.css.

See a couple of simple customization examples below.

Removing an element from a template

For example, to remove the sidebar:

• Copy the module's templates/blog/base.tpl to your own blog template directory.
• Remove the subnavbar block
• or change the contents to something else: {% block subnavbar %} something else {% endblock %}

Using a different commenting system

For instance to use Disqus:

• Create a new template file _article_comments.tpl in your blog template directory.
• Grab Disqus embed code from http://disqus.com/admin/universalcode/
• Paste it in the template.

Using different CSS

To add your own styles to mod_blog.css:

• Create your custom CSS file in your lib/css/ directory.

• In your own blog/base.tpl, change block html_head_extra:

    {% block html_head_extra %}
        {% lib
            "css/mod_blog.css"
            "css/my_blog.css"
        %}
    {% endblock %}
  

To not use the blog CSS at all, remove the block html_head_extra.

Differences with skeleton blog

Although this module derives code from the skeleton blog, many differences exist now. For example:

• Tempate files are named differently to better reflect base site.
• Most files are located in the blog directory for easier overriding.
• Template layout is adapted to better fit Bootstrap.
• Added _comments.tpl for easier overriding of the comment implementation.
• Added author view.
• Added checks for published state of articles and tags.
• Because of text changes, does currently no longer use a tranlations file.
• Media that are not put in the content are not displayed in the sidebar. Meaning that images that you want to display should be inserted in the body text.