Very basic blogging is possible in Wagn as is (see Common Wagn patterns and improve basic blogging), but it could be much, much better. 

 

I think by 2.0 we should have a built in "Post" type with solid blogging functionality (though I don't think any of it should be hard-coded; we should be able to wagneer the whole thing).  Each of these will need a bit more investigation, but my take is that the following features would suffice to create a blogging system we could be proud of.

 

Folds

When looking at a list of posts, we should see a short version (the "above the fold" portion).

 

My current thinking is that the :core view in the html renderer should handle "show:folded", such that any view that uses core can then use that syntax.

 

When that is in place, the renderer will scan for an explicit fold.  My current thinking there is that we should use something very much like tinyMCE's page break button, only use the "fold" terminology.

 

If there's not an explicit fold, we'll have to take a stab at it algorithmically.

 

See implement folds

 

Comments

 

See commenting overhaul. With just the near term there implemented as described there, it wouldn't be super easy to have great comment metadata (eg # comments, # commenters), but we could include the +discussion card on the posts page (after the fold).

 

Metadata

• *creator.  this exists but is done via WQL and should instead be a virtual pointer. (faster)
• dates - I think we have the cards for this, but I'd like to reconsider the names ("when last edited" = yuck).  maybe create date and edit date?  I'm guessing we went with "when" to be ambiguous about date v. time, but...yuck. and we may want to add a setting to format timestamps and Dates now?  Maybe that can be post 2.0?

Social media

 

Every current blog has to be linked to social media these days.  See support social media sharing.

 

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Future

I don't think we can hold up 2.0 for these, but they would certainly improve the blogging experience.

 

Preview / Drafts

Both of these would be great for a lot of things.  My thought is that a preview is a rendering of an unsaved card, while a draft is a non-current revision viewable only by the creator.

 

The challenge with previews is that rendering involves a bunch of cache lookups (especially of plus cards), and those cards aren't in the db or the cache yet.  I think the solution is to make it so that we temporarily populate the local cache, but this will involve some design and is not yet ready to act upon. See add a preview option.

 

The challenge with drafts is how to handle new cards.  (See support revisions for unsaved cards) I'm starting to think that we should basically just treat this as a trashed card, but this is a big chunk of work, too. 

 

Easy Image Insertion

A new tinyMCE button.  For most (non-wagneering) editors, this is likely to be the only kind of inclusion they'll ever create.  It should support image upload or using existing images.

 

Dynamic loading

Make an option to instead of paging load more posts when you're near/at the bottom of the page - like http://tomatleeblog.com/

 

Ping blog-tracking services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_%28blogging%29 - probably via the action API with something like *on create - or *on publish once we implement drafts

 

Blog archive

should return a list of well-labeled links which go to searches (using make date ranges WQL-queryable) for posts from each month. The months should go from the current month back to the first month that has a blog post (but only months that actually have at least one post - that may be tricky)

 

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The features should be ticketed separately, but in this idea I want to figure out how these will fit together and whether we can create something we're proud of in time for 2.0.