blog function

Add block > Utilities > Social > Blog

The basic blog function

Blog is used to publish articles and snippets of information, while allowing visitors to comment on them.
The control panel for the blog function is built in to the building tool You may find it easier to add a blog function to a otherwise blank unpublished page and use that page to edit your blog or to add new posts and moderate the comments you can also moderate the comments from the comments tab in the main menu.

From the building tool you can set the following blog parameters

• Post display
  • Headers only
    Just the title of the post
  • Headers and truncated post body
    The title and the first part of the post to the end of the nearest word below 49 characters
  • Headers and post body
    The title and the whole post
  • Headers and first image
    The title and the first image from the post or the first part of the post to the end of the nearest word below 49 characters if no image is found
  • Headers and truncated post body and first image
    The title and the first image from the post and the first part of the post to the end of the nearest word below 49 characters

• Blog posts per page
  How many posts to display per page
• Post comments per page
  How many comments to display per page
• Entries sorting
  oldest entries first or newest
• Comment sorting
  oldest comments first or newest
• Hide entry tags
  Hide the tag links in the posts
• Show tags
  Show all posts or just the posts with the selected tag
• Show search box
  hide or show the blog search box

More options

• Format
  Select a preset format for the post and comment timestamp including a "days ago" format
• Time zone
  Set your local timezone
  

Translations

• Back to posts
• Comments
• This post has no comments - be the first one !
• Post a comment
• Name
• Comment
• post
• No entries found (This only shows if your blog is empty !)
• No search results founds
• Tags
• Search
• Created at
• Showing posts tagged
• Show all comments
• See parent thread
• Show all replies
• Show replies
• reply
• You are posting as
• Please login in order to post comments
• Login
• Signup
• Please confirm your email before posting
• report spam

Html only blog settings

Using the code editor you can set additional parameters for the blog function

• format = The format of the timestamp is the same as
  Time and date you can set a custom format in this
• display_limit = Length of short description
  (default 49 chars)
• display_symbol = What gets shown at the end of the short description
  (default ...)
• version = 1 or 2
  1 New features will NOT work
  Original classes and simple markup
  2 Xtgem template classes and new markup with tags comment and search features
• badwords = Comma separated list of words banned from comments
  (banned words are replaced by *****)
• comments_disable_links = 1 disable links in comments
• poster = name fix the name of the comment poster to the name set and hide the name input

Editing and adding posts

The maximum number of posts is 500

• Add new posts using the building tool
  Or the "quick post" tool
• Edit or delete existing posts using the building tool

• Title
  You must add a title for the post
• Subtitle
  The subtitle is optional
• Tags
  A comma seperated list of tags for this post
  The tags will be shown as links below the title and subtitle
  Clicking on a tag will show a list of all posts with the same tag
• Allow html
  This will allow you to use html code in your posts or select the visual text tool on the web template
  If html is NOT allowed in a post you can use bbcode and smileys and newlines will be parsed as well
• Visual editor
  Enable / disable "visual text tool" (web only)
• Allow html in comments
  This will allow visitors to use html code in their comments
  Only a restricted number of html tags are allowed
  <u> <i> <b> <strong> <a> <img> <pre>
  All others will be filtered out.
  If html is NOT allowed in comments bbcode and smileys can be used by commenter's when writing comments
• Disable comments
  Do not allow comments for this post
• Save post as draft
  Create a post but do not publish it until this is unchecked (new posts only)

Xtfunctions xtwidgets and scripts in blogs

If html is enabled you can use:

• All html
• The html code versions of xtfunctions in your posts.
  (except another blog function)
• Javascript or jquery.
• The html version of xtwidgets
  As long as the only xtwidgets on the page are in the post

You cannot use xtscript in a blog
but you can use a blog in xtscript.

Comments

The comment system is linked to the xt:auth blog subscription service
The comment system allows unlimited multiple branches and threads of comments and replies for each post
Comments can be moderated from the blog function in the building tool
or from the "comments" tab in the panel

Comment options

In the "Site options" there is a menu for
"Blog commenting restrictions"
the options are

• None (guest posting allowed)
  Normal unrestricted commenting
• Email input required
  Require the input of a email address
• logged in users only
  Only users that have registered confirmed their email and logged in can comment

Community name

In the "profile settings" on your account page You can set a "community name"
This will be used when posting comments on all xtgem sites when you are logged in
If you have not set one you will be prompted to set one before you can comment

BBcode and Smilies for Xtblog

For non html comments and posts

• [br] line break
• [b] Bold text [/b]
• [i] Italic text [/i]
• [u] Underlined text [/u]
• [size=nn] 22px text [/size]
• [color=#hhhhhh] Colored text [/color]
• http:// addresses are automatically converted to links
• [url]http://site.com[url] does the same
• [url=http://site.com]some text[/url] creates a text link to the address
• [img]http://site.com/image file name[/img] will show a image
• [img] tags can be nested in [url=http://site.com] tags to produce image links
• [email]your@mail.com[/email]
• [code]...[/code] tags are used to show html and other codes or scripts
• (c)=© (r)=® (tm)=™

CSS styling

Users of one of xtgems templates will find that a lot of the css styling is included in the template but you can still set many extra classes in the global stylesheet file.
For users creating their own stylesheet or just adding a few extra styles the css classes are demonstrated on this site
Xt blog css demonstration site

Version one classes

Here are a blank set of the version 1 classes
Blog v1css classes (blank)

Advanced users

You can use a twig template for xtgems blog function
The code for the template is available HERE
To use twig for the blog function create a folder named _xtgem_templates
And copy the code from the above link to xtblog.twig
Twig documentation
The best way to find out about the latest updates or the twig template for the blog function is to visit the xtgem forum
XtGems Forum