June 7th, 2010

Introducing Apostrophe's Blog Plugin

Apostrophe, our content management system, now sports a nifty new blog plugin. And you can see it in action on GPTMC's Philly360.



Wondering where the blog is? In the context of a larger website, a blog doesn't always jump out and shake you by the lapels. On philly360 it's the engine behind The Insider:





Notice the navigation links at the left. You can spelunk by category, date or tag.

Don't see the categories? That's because, on this particular site, they have been rebranded as "Features." This is a common way to use Apostrophe blog categories: as separate "blogs." It's possible to set them up with entirely separate pages at any point in the site or, as in this case, as subpages of the main blog.

The Apostrophe blog plugin also drives the Events page:





But that's not quite the whole story. In truth, the blog is front and center on the home page. Let's take another look:





Notice the "News" and "Events" sections. These are Apostrophe slots pulling in recent blog posts and recent events from the blog plugin. Editors can plug in recent posts and events, or plug specific posts and events into specific pages. And designers can customize the presentation of posts to suit any page template.

Visitors can comment on blog posts in a spam-free environment, optionally logging in via Facebook, Twitter and several other services thanks to the excellent Disqus blog comment management service.

All of these capabilities are standard in Apostrophe's blog plugin. And it's open source, so Symfony developers can dive right in. Visit the Apostrophe documentation for details.

"Great, so how come your own blog is still running WordPress?" That will change! It's not broken and we have plenty of client projects to build, so it's not our first priority today. But our blog will be migrating to punkave.com/window. We need to take a little time to design it nicely and take advantage of Disqus' "import comments from Wordpress" feature.