Making blog for Visiolist

vnevermore

Member
If you ever wanted to have your own blog on your visiolist this topic will give you the way to make it easily.

I was thinking of making a blog for my toplist, where i would be able to post articles.
Instead of making it on a new folder, with another admin panel and another platform i came up with an idea.

I said... i will use the current page system. It has everything i need,
title,editable url, SEO tags and finally highly rich text editor.

What it does not have to fit 100% my needs? A thumbnail for each article/page.
So i made a thumbnail system, which actually lets you set up a preview image for each article.
http://prntscr.com/dd4fuv
http://prntscr.com/dd4g95

Its not that hard to make the thumbnail system, we use simple php to upload the files to a specific folder and rename them as the id of the page, when the file is uploaded we save on a new column on the database its URL.

Then my next step was to create, a sidebar plugin which will SELECT from the database the 5 latest articles and its data.

Easy enough copying the already made sidebars i managed to parse all the data from database to vars and then to show them on my page. ( on create, i've also added the creation_data to be saved on the database )

http://prntscr.com/dd4i38

Then you will need to use CSS to adjust the text's etc and your custom made blog is almost ready.
And that's it, in less than 2 hours you can have your own integrated blog system on your VL.

Taking this to the next level would be to create a custom page/a=blog
which will also load the data on a main blog page. ( i am working on it, will be ready today )

Also we can handle the URL's with .htaccess to be SEO friendly.

Disadvantages of doing this?
1) you cannot create anymore normal page's, but for me is no problem since i manage my custom pages with plugins. ( you can also add a boolean config is_post_for_blog on creation and SELECT only pages which have it 1 or TRUE to solve this issue )

Admins maybe on 1.6 you can integrate a copy pasted PAGE system but renamed ^_^
 

kapearl

Member
This is great! I need a blog/article plugin pretty bad for my Visiolist. To not have a separate blog system would be very nice. I already added a forum & banner system so don't want to have to manage a 4th platform.

Mark has one developed but last I heard it wasn't going to be released. I hope I'm wrong but a blog/article system of some sort separate from the custom pages would be a very valuable add on. I don't know about other list owners but I get more requests for sponsored posts vs. banner advertising requests so a place to put those w/in Visiolist would be awesome. Premium plugin? ;);)
 

Mark

Administrator
Staff member
Hey Folks, I will release the blog plugin shortly... the problem is it is not very "mature" so may require a fair bit of support. I need to decide to release it as premium plugin (supported) or free release (unsupported), given my schedule the past year its been hard to commit to this one.
 

kapearl

Member
Thanks Cajkan. I didn't see the link but guessed it easily enough on the demo.

I love the thumbnail and sidebar popular articles that vnevermore did. Those kind of additions easily make it a payable product for me. Mark I know it's a very much a time issue for you but you'd have at least me as a paying customer if you released it as premium (w/maybe those as possibilities) :)

My hopes would be members could submit blog posts as well as maybe guests or at least the admin on behalf of guests. There's a demand for more content on my site from members and non-members. I get more requests for guest posts than anything else.
 
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