The first of the blogs are up now.

I've created a blog for the Site Admin, this is accessible to any of us who login as siteadmin. I'll stuff it with items as I find time…

A blog is a category containing articles with a PubType of 'Blog'. Therefore to create a new blog, we create a new subcategory under the Blog category. Go to Categories → Add Category. Give it a name that represents what the blog is for and a short description (this appears in title tags). These fields will appear at the top of the blog page. Make sure that the blog is somewhere in the Blogs section (you can make it the 'Blog/Most Recent', 'Right after in the same level'). Should we ever have photos, then we could also select an image to go with it.
Click on Add.

We now need to create a permission that applies to this category only. Go to Privileges → Add Privilege. Give it a name (I've been using 'Blog_User' where 'User' is the name of the blog).
Select 'With Rights'
'Member Of' = leave empty
'Module' = Categories
'Component' = Link
'Level' = Delete

Now click on 'Specify the instances…' and select:
'Hooked Module' = Articles.
'Item Type' = Blogs
'Category' = the category created above.
'Access Level' - Delete All

then click the 'Finish and Apply' button.

This takes you back to the previous screen, where we now add the Component 'Bloggers' to the privilege and click Add to finish.

This has now created a privilege that applies to that particular blog. To assign it to the user, go to Roles and find the user. Click on the icon to the right that is Show the Privileges. On the next page, find the drop down at the bottom of the page called Assign a Privilege…, select the privilege created above (Blog_username) and assign it.

Done.

Login as with your user name as usual.

Follow this link: http://accu.org/index.php?module=articles&type=admin&func=new&ptid=10

You will see the following fields:

• Title: the blog title as it will appear on the summary and on the blog page.
• Summary: the piece of text that will appear on the home page, this is a short introduction, or precis, for the blog.
• Body: the body of the blog. This can contain some basic HTML markup. Normally <p> will be all that is needed.
• Notes: not sure what to use this feed for. Maybe keywords?

Fields are pretty self explanatory. Summary is what is shown on the listing of the blogs on the front page. It can be an intro to the blog entry, or a precis. Notes are not currently used…

After filling in the fields, select one of the buttons at the bottom of the page and save the entry.

To re-edit or delete blog entries, follow the link above and select the tab at the top 'Manage Articles'. This gives a listing of blog articles with links for 'edit' or 'delete' the blog. You can also use this page to change the status from 'Approved' to 'Rejected' which will keep the blog, but it won't be displayed. It can be reassigned 'Approved' again later.

I strongly recommend writing the blog up in an editor and cutting and pasting the text over. This avoids possibly losing the article text should a session time out.

I've added an icon/link to the front page so that visitors can find the RSS feed. I'll add feeds to other parts of the site as it seems worth while doing that.

Currently there are half a dozen setup with blogs, but only myself and Alan Lenton have found time to write anything. Maybe by the time summer cools down there will be more time and energy for it.

I've also tidied up the backend pages a bit, so that visitors can view all blogs by a person, or all blogs on site. See links in breadcrumb trails.