30 June 2010, 8:13

Hi

Just installed Mahara 1.3.0 beta 1 on a test server (very nice ) and I have went to My Blog and I only have a 'Settings' button and a 'Add Post' button. There does not seem to be an 'Add blog' button like in previous versions.

Do users only add posts to their single blog or am i jumping the gun a little?

Thanks

Ali

30 June 2010, 16:12

Ali, here's the explanation (pasted from an email I sent to someone else):

We've had quite a few reports of confused people adding new blogs when they meant to add new posts to existing blogs, and we're also aware that the vast majority of users only need a single blog. So now to simplify things (and after a bit of back & forth arguing between Evan & me) we decided to give users one blog by default, and they don't see the 'add blog' button at all.

On a site that's being upgraded, existing users who already have either zero or many blogs will still see the old blog listing by default.

For all users, on old or new sites, the one blog vs multiple blogs display can be toggled with a checkbox on the user preferences screen. So to add a second blog, you need to go to the settings page first, click "enable multiple blogs", save, and then your menu item should change from "My Blog" to "My Blogs" and the add blog button will appear on that page.

We do intend to add some text to the Blog settings page to direct users to settings if they want to add more blogs.  Eventually we'd like to remove multiple blogs altogether because we can achieve everything we need by tagging posts.

01 July 2010, 3:26

Many thanks Richard.

I think whats within your reply is an excellent idea with the user being allowed to choose from a single blog or multiple blogs. The school students who came to our College also got confused about blogs and blog postings.

Though i am not sure about the complete removal of multiple blogs would be good move as our own students found that having multiple blogs very useful and structured.

Thanks again

Ali

p.s. loving the new version!

01 July 2010, 17:45

Hi,

I second Ali's comment on the blogs. Multiple blogs can be confusing to students, especially when they do not have any prior blog experience. Then some created tons of blogs instead of blog posts.

As Ali's students, I find that having multiple blogs keeps blog content nicely organized. I usually explain the possibility to create multiple blogs as having categories and dividing your overall diary into subsections (e.g. on WordPress you also have categories and tags and thus have two ways of structuring and eventually also displaying your content).

We do have the possibility to add tags, but how can you make all blog entries from just one tag visible in a view? That's why I have been suggesting to students to use multiple blogs: They can easily and quickly publish one blog to a view (and later individual posts are added automatically) without having to select each blog entry separately.

Cheers

Kristina

P.S. In case anybody is wondering why my previous post was deleted: Richard was faster in answering and had more detail in his post. Thus I just deleted mine.

18 October 2010, 6:26

Dear all

Adding to this conversation from an alternative perspective in the hope that there is a workaround for this.

I have just had to go and enable multiple blogs for all our users by individually logging in to each of their accounts  and amending their settings.  Luckily, as we're in a pilot phase of using Mahara, that was only abut 50 users!

I can't expect my users (as new to Mahara) to have to make the switch at the outset - they already have enough to take on board. In the future, I need 'enable multiple blogs' to be the default for our circumstances...

The issue has arisen for post-grad students copying a PDP template created by their tutor.  This template includes a blog block that they have been given permission to copy as their own editable version.  Because of the default single blog setting, the blog content copies to their view but the actual blog itself doesn't appear in their blog list in MyPortfolio.  This means the blog content is completely uneditable and the template view is unusable...

We are going to find this an issue for the majority of our users.

Any advice you can give would be much appreciated!

Vic

19 October 2010, 3:34

Hello Vic,

For enabling multiple blogs: You could change your code and put the default settings on multiple blogs. That should be possible. However, as I am not a developer, one of them would have to tell you where to find that bit of code if you can't find it yourself.

For the template: When you put the blog into a view, did you ensure that the blog content can be copied? When you pull in a blog blocktype - no matter whether entire blog or just a blog post - you have "More options" before you can save the block. There you should choose "Others will get their own copy of your blog". That should work and give them the blog content into their blog area. It worked for me with having multiple blogs activated.

Cheers

Kristina

19 October 2010, 15:38

Vic,

You'll find the default setting Kristina talked about in htdocs/lib/user.php, in the expected_account_preferences function.

It will be moved out of there at some point in the future because it really belongs in a hook somewhere in the blog plugin (there is a bug report about this somewhere).

R.