Creating a Blog with Scrawl

How to create a blog with Scrawl

Scrawl is a lightweight blogging product for Plone that lets you create a simple, elegant blog that makes the best use possible of Plone's built-in features.

To create a simple blog with Scrawl, install Scrawl, then perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new folder to contain your blog
  2. Inside this folder, create a Collection/Smart Folder to serve as the homepage of your blog.
  3. Create the following query criteria for your Collection/Smart Folder:
    Item Type: Blog Entry
    State: Published
    Sort on: Effective Date (reverse)
  4. Navigate back to your new blog folder, and use the Display menu to select your Collection/Smart Folder the default item for the folder
  5. Use the Display menu to select Blog View as the default view for the Collection/Smart Folder
  6. (Optional) Use the "Add New" menu to restrict the addable content types in your blog folder to Blog Entry, Smart Folder and maybe Image, File or Page if you want to be able to add these to your blog

 

That's it!  You're ready to blog! Add and publish Blog Entries in your blog folder



 

Abbreviate text

Posted by Yves Moisan at Feb 20, 2008 09:32 PM
Hey Jon,

Nice! I wonder if there is a trick to avoid the "read more" to appear when all the text is there anyhow :-). In fact, I'd like the opposite : limit the number of lines to some number (e.g. 10) so that the "read more" really means something and people can see many posts at a glance. Is there a settings somewhere in your view or blog type that I missed ?

There must be a trick for people like Martin to show up on planet.plone.org nice and short while others seem like they copy-pasted their whole post text (which I find annoying, personally).

Cheers,

Yves

Own reply

Posted by Yves Moisan at Feb 20, 2008 09:56 PM
I guess what I'm asking is the content item description + some lines of the body. I just checked Martin's set up and only the description (and title of course) is sent along to Planet Plone. I guess it would be trickier to also send a few sentences of the text, but I just saw an example in the ZMI! I hit an edit tab of some content object and I saw the first few lines of it with an ellipsis :-)

Good idea, but...

Posted by Jon Stahl at Feb 20, 2008 10:03 PM
... unfortunately it would require subclassing or modifying Plone's News Item content type to have a 'teaserText' class, which Scrawl is expressly not going to do. That is a good idea for a future release of Plone, though... all content types should support such a function, IMHO.

We could suppress "read more" if there is nothing more to read, though. I'll create a ticket for that. You could probably just twiddle the view template in the meantime, though.

Nothing more to read

Posted by Yves Moisan at Feb 20, 2008 10:07 PM
Is it not the case that there is never anything more to read, since the whole text is always shown ?

Thanx for your suggestions.

Description and body text

Posted by Jon Stahl at Feb 20, 2008 11:26 PM
With Scrawl 1.0-beta2, we show only the Description if it exists, otherwise we show the body text.

Yep

Posted by Yves Moisan at Feb 21, 2008 03:34 PM
Indeed and it works fine thanx. I usually fill the description of folders, but not of non-folderish objects like documents as I feel a description usually is redundant for objects that have a body type :-(. I guess the help comment should read "Summary of your blog to appear as a lead to your full post; leaving this field empty means the full text of the post will appear rather than a short lead" or something along these lines rather than "A short summary of the content."

Thanx for the tip.

Nothing more to read

Posted by Karl Johan Kleist at Aug 29, 2008 12:47 PM
I'm suppressing "Read more... " if there is nothing more to read, by a quick-and-dirty fix of "blog_view.pt":

Change

    <p class="tileFooter">

to

    <p class="tileFooter" tal:condition="item_description">

default

Posted by stef at Jul 24, 2008 08:44 AM
Hey John,

First off all thanks for the product it is precisely what I need, a blog for the school. As a beginner with plone these things make life a lot easier.
There is one thing that I cant get right. I have tried the FAQ's but can't find the answer.

- select your Collection/Smart Folder the default item for the folder.

I can make everything default except a collection and a folder. I hope you can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks

Stef

default

Posted by Zoltan Soos at Feb 13, 2009 04:19 AM
in ZMI: /portal_properties/site_properties go to "default_page_types" option and add "Topic"

change order

Posted by unset at Feb 10, 2009 10:33 PM
Hi,
I followed your little howto and have a very sice blog now, thanke!
However, I want to note here that I had to swap steps 4 and 5, because I cannot change the view of a collection anymore to blog view after declaring it to be the default item. I don't know why that is (plone 3 here), maybe I'm just to blind to find the right button? ;-)
Anyway, changing the order of point 4 and 5 fixed that for me.


cu
  Gerrit