I have found that a low barrier way to add new features to people's blogs here at blogs@psu is to use tags.
For example, today I was confronted with a screencast explaining how to change the banner image in the professional template set, more or less demonstrating these instructions. The complexity of what we were asking users to do inspired me to whip up a little code for the styles.css template that will automatically add the style for the banner image using the URL for the newest asset tagged @banner. You can look forward to this template making its way into the blogs@psu professional website template default soon. It's just a couple lines of template code. Here it is:
<mt:Assets lastn="1" type="image" tag="@banner">
#homepage-image { background-image: url(<$mt:AssetURL$>) !important; }
</mt:Assets>
Took me about 1 minute to get working and about 5 minutes to test.
If I didn't want to use tags, I could have written some perl code to make a plugin that would add a checkbox to the asset edit screen or perhaps some code to implement a banner chooser interface. Seems like overkill. The great thing is that any user of blogs@psu can edit their templates to take advantage of tags like this, to add new features to their blogs, but they can't (for obvious reasons) write and run their own plugins to run as part of blogs@psu.
The "@" tags are called private tags because they are meant for internal use like this. They don't show up in your tag cloud or on your published pages or entries. The professional template set makes use of these private tags to get content into the static homepage , about, and contact page. It also controls what appear in the top nav bar using the @topnav tag.
Perhaps students could use an @portfolio tag to select which artifacts from their blog-repository they wish to include in their blog-portfolio.
My question to you is this: Is this too hard for most students to grok? Do we need to implement custom fields and checkboxes to do the kind of things I mention in this post. If students are be exposed to blogs as part of their education, is this tagging part of it? Is it really that difficult? I admit at first glance it may seem kinda kludgy, but I am starting to see a certain elegance to it. What do you think?
For example, today I was confronted with a screencast explaining how to change the banner image in the professional template set, more or less demonstrating these instructions. The complexity of what we were asking users to do inspired me to whip up a little code for the styles.css template that will automatically add the style for the banner image using the URL for the newest asset tagged @banner. You can look forward to this template making its way into the blogs@psu professional website template default soon. It's just a couple lines of template code. Here it is:
<mt:Assets lastn="1" type="image" tag="@banner">
#homepage-image { background-image: url(<$mt:AssetURL$>) !important; }
</mt:Assets>
Took me about 1 minute to get working and about 5 minutes to test.
If I didn't want to use tags, I could have written some perl code to make a plugin that would add a checkbox to the asset edit screen or perhaps some code to implement a banner chooser interface. Seems like overkill. The great thing is that any user of blogs@psu can edit their templates to take advantage of tags like this, to add new features to their blogs, but they can't (for obvious reasons) write and run their own plugins to run as part of blogs@psu.
The "@" tags are called private tags because they are meant for internal use like this. They don't show up in your tag cloud or on your published pages or entries. The professional template set makes use of these private tags to get content into the static homepage , about, and contact page. It also controls what appear in the top nav bar using the @topnav tag.
Perhaps students could use an @portfolio tag to select which artifacts from their blog-repository they wish to include in their blog-portfolio.
My question to you is this: Is this too hard for most students to grok? Do we need to implement custom fields and checkboxes to do the kind of things I mention in this post. If students are be exposed to blogs as part of their education, is this tagging part of it? Is it really that difficult? I admit at first glance it may seem kinda kludgy, but I am starting to see a certain elegance to it. What do you think?
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