Scrawl: Lightweight blogging

Scrawl is a lightweight blog product for Plone 2.1, 2.5, 3.x, and 4.0

Project Description

Scrawl is a lightweight blogging product for Plone that attempts to re-use as much of Plone's out-of-the-box functionality as possible.

What Scrawl provides

Scrawl is deliberately minimalist.  It provides:

• A "Blog Entry" content type, which is simply a copy of a standard Plone News Item
• A "blog view" view for Collections/Smart Folders
• Nothing else! :-)

With these elements, plus Plone's built-in features, it is easy to quickly construct a simple, powerful blog.

Best of all, because Scrawl lets you use so much of Plone's built-in features for blogging, Scrawl is extremely compatible and future-proof.  Scrawl works on Plone 2.1, 2.5, and Plone 3, and should continue to work under future releases of Plone.

Scrawl's basic features can be extended with other Plone add-on products.

Scrawl in action

You can see Scrawl in action at:

• Scat! Conservation Northwest's blog — Scrawl, along with qPloneComments on a Plone 2.5.x site

• The Signpost — Scrawl on Plone 3.0, along with TagCloud and collective.captcha

If you've got a Scrawl-powered blog you'd like to show off as a great example of what Scrawl can do, drop us a line!

How does Scrawl compare to…

There are several other excellent blog products for Plone.  Here's a quick rundown, and how they compare to Scrawl.  (Hint: Scrawl is way less ambitious and less feature-rich than nearly all of them!)

…Quills?

Quills offers quite a few more features, and more complexity.

Notable features Quills provides that Scrawl does not include:

• Date-based archives for blog entries
• Configurable per-blog settings
• Topic images
• Automated "pings" to Technorati and other similar services
• MetaWeblogAPI support for third-party blog authoring tools
• Blog-specific portlets

Quills is a great choice if you need "full-on" blogging.  Scrawl is intended for much simpler, more casual use-cases.

Quills 1.6 works only with Plone 3.  Older versions of Quills are compatible with Plone 2.5 and 2.1, but are significantly less polished than Quills 1.6.  Scrawl is compatible with Plone 2.1 through 3.x.

…CoreBlog2?

CoreBlog2 is also much more full-featured than Scrawl.  It offers a feature set roughly comparable to Quills.

One important thing to note about CoreBlog2 is that, unlike Quills and Scrawl, it provides its own commenting framework, rather than using Plone's underlying comments.  That allows it to offer more commenting-related features without add-on products, but also may pose future migration challenges.

…SimpleBlog?

SimpleBlog is similar in spirit to Scrawl, but we think Scrawl is even more minimalist. ;-)

• SimpleBlog supports only Plone 2.5 and 2.1; no Plone 3-compatible version yet
• SimpleBlog has custom content types for a blog, a blog entry and a blogfolder.
• SimpleBlog supports some features that Scrawl does not, including:
• Cross-posting an entry between blogs
• "Always on top" blog posts
• A custom implementation of categories that allows for site-wide categories, and blog-specific categories
• Recent comments and recent entries portlets

Thanks

Special thanks to Dean Ericksen for naming a hard-to-name product!

Self-Certification

[X] Internationalized

[ ] Unit tests

[X] End-user documentation

[ ] Internal documentation (documentation, interfaces, etc.)

[X] Existed and maintained for at least 6 months

[X] Installs and uninstalls cleanly

[X] Code structure follows best practice