A BlogFactory

Before, you where told to create a new web using TWiki's ManageWebs tool and create a blog web derived from the _BlogPlugin template web. Are you new to TWiki and does this sound like gibberish? And then you got some half configured web where you had to figure out how go on from that point. Over. Well nearly. I don't say that we solved the hassles coming with all those add-ons that have to be installed one after the other to get things up and running. Point is that you can create a new blog more easily and in an obvious way.

Technically, this is done by creating a REST handler that is an extension of TWiki's ``createWeb'' feature. Sadly, this part of TWiki is not pluggable or extendable in any way so that more actions can be carried out after a we has been created. So our version basically does the same but sets yet more preference values in WebPreferences that you had to fix by hand in a separate step afterwards. Infact after creating a blog web, it was not 100% functional and you had to finalize it according to the welcome message. And I am pretty sure most didn't read that longish text anyway. Heh, nice welcome.

But I am not all satisfied with the result. The BlogFactory could even do better. So this is just the first release that has this kind of installation wizard. There are at least two things that I still want to add to the BlogFactory wizard:

1. offer an option to link instead of copying the template web, thereby reducing redundancy vastly; so if there is an error in BlogUp and you have -- let's say -- 10 blogs running on your TWiki you just have to fix it once and not 10 times.
2. generate a BlogAuthorGroup and/or a BlogAdminGroup for each new web so that you may separate access rights; this entails altering a couple of topics in the blog afterwards; note, however that this conflicts with (1) in some cases.

Oh, and before I forget it: as you could think of the BlogPlugin as a blog construction set, we could have a couple of template blogs (like the _BlogPlugin template web), partially being linked to each other to reduce redundancy, but with different pre-configured blog layouts.

Yeah, and to round up this undertaking there should be a TopicFunction to render the most recent postings in all known blogs on your TWiki installation. But that's the easiest part.

Basically this means that the BlogPlugin will be ready to host a lot of blogs in a manageable way.