I have mentioned here and there my vision of blogs@psu as not just a rigid web publishing system limited to the templates and structures that those running the thing (like me) will bless, but more of a general platform for enabling all kinds of interactions on the web.
This is why I met Chris Millet's blog post today with such joy. He used MT's custom field feature to add a location field for the entries and modified the templates to generate a GeoRSS feed and embed a maps widget from yahoo. Check out his post. It is really cool.
What MT/blogs@psu needs to provide is a way for developers to easily package and share these features. I know they could become template sets, but I am thinking something more flexible: 1) Something that I don't need to install on the server and could continued to be maintained by the author (kind of like the way styles can be shared via stylecatcher) and 2) something that could be mix-and-matched. For example, I might want to add maps support to either a "classic blog" or a "professional website".
The future is now, my friends.
Yes, I think a system like the StyleCatcher style sharing would be great (admittedly I haven't used it much but get the gist). For my GeoRSS thingy, sharable templates would get you most of the way there, although you'd still have to read some directions to get the custom field patched in, and people could get the field name wrong and break it. Ideally you'd install the whole thing with the custom field and any other relevant settings included.
Anyway, the process has taught me a lot, and I see there's some really cool stuff you can do with some pretty basic template modification and/or using custom fields.
Next step: get GeoRSS feeds to aggregate via blog search so we can build a master map of of PSU bloggers.
I am not 100% sure, but I think we can include the creation of the custom field in the template set.
For the aggregate blog search, I'd have to add the custom field to the rss template for the search results.
I am think including location on entries has so much potential and it is rather unobtrusive, that I might want to add this to all blogs by default.
An idea like this is what makes having a platform so important! Since we're pushing it as an open space to do your thing, once people figure out they can do whatever, new and interesting things will pop up left and right. The location field is so cool that it would get me to use my blog in a very different way -- I'd love to be able to use it more like Twitter/Brightkite for my own recollection of where I've been and what I was doing there.
Should it be a standard feature? Sure. What does the process for accepting interesting changes look like? Do we ned one? I love the style catcher idea as a long term goal.