Question

I installed the blog plugin,and set up a coupld of blogs, but I cannot edit them. I have relaxed the file permissions on the server and have made sure that options such access rights have been set to cover groups of which I am a member (and not to ban groups of which i am not a member), but still I can't do anything.No "edit" button appears on the WebPreferences page or any other.I had to use a text editor to change the WebPreferences directly on the server. This problem also means that I cannot edit or delete any blog entries.

How do I enable editing on my blogs?

Another, perhaps related, problem is that there is no entry in the WebPreferences for renaming or deleting a blog. This is one of many ways in which the blog plugin forces behaviour appropriate for a blog intended for the general public onto users such as myself who want to use a blog more as a personal journal and who would like it to behave more like its parent web. For example the lack of a left bar makes it hard to switch back and forth between the blog and other webs. Unfortunately the structure of blog webs and of blog web pages is so different from those based on the default template that it is not at all obvious how to change any of this.

How can I get my blog to behave more like other webs?

Environment

-- RobertPersson - 03 Jul 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Before I answer your two questions: it is highly recommended to use NatSkin in combination with the BlogPlugin. Since the recent changes of PatternSkin and BlogPlugin the support for PatternSkin has fallen short unfortunately. NatSkin has better support for TWikiApplications like the BlogPlugin currently.

Now to answer your first question: you will only see the "BlogAuthorTools" in the sidebar if you are a blog author, that is member of the BlogAuthorGroup. Any topic included used in a view you have edit rights for will have a red dot (using the RedDotPlugin) next to its headline to jump into editing this fragment quickly.

Second question (make blog behave more like webs): the motivation for not behaving like the other webs is that everything not related to the blog application has been removed, i.e. a list to all the other webs on your TWiki installation. If you installed the NatSkin then you will get an extra navigation bar at the top to access the different parts of the blog as well as escape from it to enter back the rest of the site. These are the tabs "Blog" (could be named "Home" also), "Wiki" (jump to Main.WebHome), "News" (jump to aggregation section) and "Archive" (enter blog archive).

If you want to customize the BlogPlugin so that blogs behave more like normal webs, then change the TopicFunction that renders the sidebar navigation called RenderSideBar. Note, however, that the sidebar adaptive, that is it changes depending on the topic type displayed currently. Best would be to create a new TopicFunction called RenderWebList that creates a sidebar section "Webs" to it listing other webs on you TWiki installation. The add a %DBCALL{"RenderWebList"}% to RenderSideBar for those sidebar variations where it should be visible.

-- MichaelDaum - 04 Jul 2006