I was bugging Boris with some emails today to ask about Drupal’s support for structured blogging. I was asking if Drupal would be getting something like the WordPress Structured Blogging plugin, which provides templates for authoring various microformats.
It wasn’t until after he responded that I realized how silly my question was. Drupal doesn’t need the plugin, because support for custom formats and authoring templates is baked into the DNA of Drupal. Even for non-coders, anyone can make up new formats (and templates) on the fly using the flexinode module. And several other formats are already available as prepackaged modules (events, reviews, etc…)
So, just a reminder to myself to think about the nature of the solution, and not go looking for something done “the WordPress way” (or matching any other particular implementation – various applications have different concepts behind the scenes, and may approach the same problem from different angles)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Darcy:
That flexinode module looks amazing (especially for me since I’m a non-coder!). That said, SB support in Drupal would still be neat (actually, all support is neat) and I hope to see it soon. The more people write SB content, the better the apps will be that are built onto it.
Steven Cohen
PubSub Concepts
scohen@pubsub.com
Drupal will be coming up with CCK which pushes flexinodes a step further… you end up with a cleaner implementation with widgets that you can throw together into any node type and you can search all of the widgets of the same types via one function. In this respect Drupal rocks. Currently with flexinode however its kind of dangerous as flexinodes are rather ugly in their backend storage structure.
– the more you know –
The forthcoming CCK and Views modules will make Drupal truly rock. I am not sure how much more of a need there will be for structured blogging with their introduction.
I’m using flexinode in our build of drupal. It was very easy to setup, but like Sami Khan, I wouldn’t suggest that the storage is ideal in someways. I wonder how it will scale, but otherwise, the thing it is great. I’m looking forward to CCK in 4.7 too. I’ll be doing some performance testing before deploying it (or CCK) more widely … which I’m definately thinking about doing. Cheers, Matt