sfSimpleBlog plugin

The sfSimpleBlogPlugin adds standard weblog features to an existing website:

• List of posts
• Details of a post
• Ability to add a comment
• Email alert on comments
• Tagsonomy
• RSS feeds (if sfFeed2Plugin is installed)
• Administration for posts and comments

It is not aimed at replacing full-featured blog packages, but offers a lightweight alternative for when you build a website that has to contain a blog section. It is voluntarily simple and limited (that's why it doesn't come with a BBCode parser, a search engine, a media asset library, or a user management module). However, it is very easy to configure and adapt, so it should fulfill most basic blog requirements.

This plugin can only provide one blog per project.

Screenshots

Contents

This plugin contains one schema with three new Propel classes:

• sfSimpleBlogPost
• sfSimpleBlogComment
• sfSimpleBlogTag

It also contains three modules that you can activate in whatever application you need them:

• sfSimpleBlog: Blog front-end
• sfSimpleBlogPostAdmin: Backend for managing posts
• sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin: Backend for managing comments

The plugin is fully i18n and is bundled with English, French, German, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish and Spanish versions. Additional translations are easy to implement.

Installation

Tip: If you just want to test the plugin, a sandbox already packaged with the right plug-ins and configured correctly is available for download in this page. Click here to download the sandbox.

The prerequisites for using the sfSimpleBlog plugin are:

• As the plugin doesn't contain a user management module, the project where you install it must have a table managing authors, or users (whatever the name), and the related Propel class must have a __toString() method. Both these conditions are satisfied by the sfGuardPlugin, so installing this plugin is a good choice.
• If you want to use RSS feeds, you must install the sfFeed2Plugin.
• If you want to use rich text editing, the TinyMCE JavaScript editor must be installed in your project.
• If you want to use the sfMediaLibrary in conjunction with TinyMCE, you must install the sfMediaLibraryPlugin.

To install the plugin for a symfony project, the usual process is to use the symfony command line:

$ php symfony plugin-install http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfSimpleBlogPlugin

Alternatively, if you don't have PEAR installed, you can download the latest package attached to this plugin's wiki page and extract it under your project's plugins/ directory. You will also have to copy the contents of the myproject/plugins/sfSimpleBlogPlugin/web/ directory into a myproject/web/sfSimpleBlogPlugin/ directory.

Clear the cache to enable the autoloading to find the new classes:

$ php symfony cc

Rebuild the model and generate the SQL code for the three new tables:

$ php symfony propel-build-model
$ php symfony propel-build-sql

Use the generated SQL file in myproject/data/sql/plugins.sfSimpleBlogPlugin.lib.model.schema.sql to build the new tables in your project's database.

$ mysql -uroot mydb < data/sql/plugins.sfSimpleBlogPlugin.lib.model.schema.sql

Enable the three new modules in your applications, via the settings.yml file.

// in myproject/apps/frontend/config/settings.yml
all:
  .settings:
    enabled_modules:        [default, sfSimpleBlog, sfSimpleBlogPostAdmin, sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin]

Start using the plugin by browsing to the frontend module's default page:

http://myproject/frontend_dev.php/sfSimpleBlog

Tip: To test the plugin with test data, execute the following command:

$ php symfony propel-load-data frontend plugins/sfSimpleBlogPlugin/data/fixtures

Configuration

The app.yml file

The plugin is highly configurable and should be easy to integrate to an existing project. Here is the default plugin configuration, taken from myproject/plugins/sfSimpleBlogPlugin/config/sfSimpleBlog.yml.sample:

all:
  sfSimpleBlog:
    title:         How is life on earth?
    tagline:       You'd better start to live before it's too late
    author:        John Doe
    email:         john.doe@howislifeonearth.com   # Used only for alerts on comments

    sidebar:       [custom, recent_posts, tags, feeds, blogroll, meta]

    custom : |
      <h2>About the author</h2>
      <p>My name is John Doe and I'm a freelance freelancer. I do things when I have time, 
      and the rest of the time, I write things here.</p>

    blogroll:
      - { title: how is life on earth?, url: 'http://www.howislifeonearth.com' }
      - { title: google, url: 'http://www.google.com' }

    user_class: sfGuardUser        # class name for the user class
    use_bundled_layout: true       # if true, the three modules will use sfSimpleBlog/templates/layout.php for layout; if false, they will use the layout settings from the view.yml
    use_ajax:      true            # enable posting of comments in Ajax
    use_feeds:     true            # enable feeds (require sfFeed2Plugin)
    use_rich_text: false           # enable tinyMCE
    use_media_library: false       # enable support for sfMediaLibrary in TinyMCE (requires sfMediaLibraryPlugin)
    use_date_in_url: false         # enable to use urls in the form of /year/month/day/title (set to 'false' for backwards compatibility)

    use_post_extract: true         # display extract in post list instead of full post body
    post_max_per_page:  5          # number of posts displayed in a list of posts
    post_recent:        5          # number of posts to display in the recent sidebar widget

    comment_enabled:        on     # enable comments by default on new posts
    comment_disable_after:  0      # number of days after which comments on a post are not possible anymore
                                   # set to 0 for unlimited comments
    comment_automoderation: on     # triggers the automoderation of comments. Possible values are:
                                   # on: comments are not published until a moderator accepts them
                                   # first_post: the first comment of a user must be accepted, subsequent posts are accepted automatically
                                   # off: comments are automatically accepted and published

    comment_mail_alert: on         # send an email to the blog owner when a comment is posted.
                                   # Possible values are: 
                                   # on: send an email for every posted comment
                                   # moderated: send an email for every automoderated comment

    feed_count:         5          # number of posts appearing in the RSS feed

You can customize these settings in myproject/apps/myapp/config/app.yml

The sidebar array controls which widgets, and in which order, appear in the sidebar of the blog frontend. The existing widgets are:

• custom: insertion of custom HTML code taken from the blog_custom parameter
• recent_posts: list of recent posts
• tags: list of tags
• feeds: links to the RSS and Atom feeds
• blogroll: list of blogs
• meta: not much for now (link to administration modules, but the link works only if the modules are in the same application)

Security, view configuration, custom templates, etc.

Just like for every other plugin module, the sfSimpleBlog, sfSimpleBlogPostAdmin, and sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin modules can be partly overridden by your applications.

For instance, if you want to restrict access to the sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin module to users with an editor credential, create a sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin directory in your application module/ folder, and create in a config/security.yml with the following content:

// in myproject/apps/backend/modules/sfSimpleBlogCommentAdmin/config/security.yml
all:
  is_secure: on
  credentials: [editor]

Alternatively, if you want the sfSimpleBlog module to use some special templates for presentation, you can create templates and partials with the same name as the plugin's ones in this kind of tree structure:

myproject/apps/frontend/modules/sfSimpleBlog/
  templates/
    _add_comment.php
    _blogroll.php
    _comment.php
    _comment_list.php
    _feed.php
    _meta.php
    _post.php
    _post_short.php
    _recentPosts.php
    _sidebar.php
    _tagList.php
    addCommentAjax.php
    feedSuccess.php
    indexSuccess.php
    sendMailOnCommentSuccess.php
    showByTagSuccess.php
    showSuccess.php

Routing

The plugin doesn't ship with routing rules, so that you can define your own. Example routing rules for the main actions are given below:

blog_index:
  url: /blog
  param: { module: sfSimpleBlog, action: index }

blog_article_with_date:
  url: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:stripped_title
  param: { module: sfSimpleBlog, action: show }

blog_article:
  url: /blog/:stripped_title
  param: { module: sfSimpleBlog, action: show }

blog_tag:
  url: /blog/tag/:tag
  param: { module: sfSimpleBlog, action: showByTag }

TODO

• Archives sidebar widget
• Use Joins and calculated fields (for nb comments and tags) to reduce query count
• Unit tests
• Add hooks to allow extension by other plugins
• Trackbacks
• Use sfModerationPlugin instead of built-in moderation

Changelog

Trunk

• Javier.Eguiluz: Added spanish translation
• Tero.Alen: Added finnish translation

2007-11-29 | 0.8.5 Beta

• sebastien: Added the ability to send mail alerts to more than one recipient
• francois: Fixed tags not working when output escaping is turned off
• francois: Fixed publication date displayed was indeed the creation date
• francois: Added the ability to display date in the URL (based on a patch from Mark.Quezada)
• francois: Added the ability to display full posts in lists
• francois: Fixed feeds not working when output escaping is turned on
• francois: Fixed posts with no tags appear incorrectly when output escaping is turned on
• jfcaouette: Fixed incorrect parameter name in sfSimpleBlogPostAdmin
• Manuel.Dalla.Lana: Added Italian translation for sfSimpleBlog module
• Rimenes.Ribeiro: Added translation for Brazilian Portuguese
• jzalas: Added Polish translation
• francois: Added test data
• francois: Added lib/model/plugin for more customization
• francois: Removed the need for a custom config handler
• francois: Removed schemaConfig.php. To customize the schema, use sfPropelAlternativeSchemaPlugin
• gregoire: Changed the default «comment_disable_after» value to 0.
• gregoire: Error with various versions of PHP, if(array()) does not work.
• francois: Flatified the app.yml config file
• francois: Fixed number of comments displayed in post list
• francois: Split the configuration into an application-wide and a project-wide file
• fabien: Don't save empty tags
• francois: Made the default schema play well with sfGuard

2007-06-10 | 0.8.4 Beta

• fabien: made the plugin compatible with symfony 1.0
• gordon: Better handling dashes in post titles and URLs
• gordon: Fixed comments sort order
• francois: Make comments optional and add delay after which comments are no more possible
• francois: Better handling of special characters in post titles and URLs

2007-04-20 | 0.8.3 Beta

• SentinelDiety?: Fixed feeds on case-sensitive filesystems
• SentinelDiety?: Fixed post feeds when User table is not named User
• francois: Added hooks to allow extension of TinyMCE by the sfMediaLibraryPlugin
• francois: Fixed a bug when editing a post

2007-04-10 | 0.8.2 Beta

• francois: Added email alert on comment
• francois: Added blogroll in the sidebar
• francois: Added ability to have more than one custom sidebar element

2007-04-06 | 0.8.1 Beta

• francois: removed lib/model/om/ and lib/model/map from package
• gordon: Added German translations
• Michael.Nolan: fixed incorrect validation message in addComment.yml

2007-04-03 | 0.8.0 Beta

• francois: Initial release

Active tickets

#2549

sfSimpleBlog - stripped title

#2920

[PATCH] Add Archives Widget and View

#3369

Branch sfSimpleBlogPlugin for 1.1

#3691

[PATCH] [sfSimpleBlogPlugin] tagList doesn't honor the post.is_published flag, taglist is unsorted

#3886

Problem when valiting a comment with date & stripped title enabled