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An App A Day: New Blog 3.0 with Details-Paging, Open-Graph and Very-Rich-Content

The new Blog App offers loads of new, neat features, including Multi-Language, Share-This integration, paging in read-mode and Very-Rich Content. Le'ts look at the highlights:

Paging in Read / Details View

This is something we copied from large online newspapers, allowing a reader to page to the next (or previous) blog-post while reading. You can design it as you wish - this is what it looks like by default: 

Very Rich Content

Previous version of the Blog App already supported adding apps to the details-page, but the editing experience got a bit complicated. Thanks to the new Very-Rich-Content feature in 2sxc 8.9, this is now awesome. So you can just add any app inline into your blog-post, and write more text right after it. Here's what it looks like in the TinyMCE wysiwyg editor:

Open-Graph Headers for Social Sharing

We're now including all facebook and twitter open-graph headers on the details-page, to allow great social sharing :).

Share-This Integration Built in

Most users want to have a quick social-sharing feature, and it's now built in. All you need to do is update your share-link in the app settings:

 

Multi-Language EN / DE included

We now made the blog-app multi-language, so all fields and all buttons/labels are ML and pre-translated for English and Deutsch/German. You can also make articles multi-language, but that's an uncommon scenario. 

Categories and Tags

Wordpress uses a combination of Categories and Tags to mark their contributions. Basically categories are more stable taxonomies (usually there is a page just for that category), and tags are more volatile folksonomies (spontaneously assigned). This is now the default on the Blog App.

Minor Improvements

  1. Publishing / unpublishing now uses the 2sxc standard method
  2. Special optional header-fields available for more SEO control
  3. Cleaned up and re-organized fields to make it easier to edit

TL;DR

Download the DNN Blog App 3.0 from the App-Catalog or check out the code on GitHub. Note that it's using some newer features of 2sxc, so you'll need 2sxc 8.9+. 

Love from Switzerland,
Daniel

PS: I'd like to welcome Raphael Hirscher to the sexy-team. He also implemented some of the features of the Blog 3 :). 


Daniel Mettler grew up in the jungles of Indonesia and is founder and CEO of 2sic internet solutions in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, an 20-head web specialist with over 800 DNN projects since 1999. He is also chief architect of 2sxc (see github), an open source module for creating attractive content and DNN Apps.

Read more posts by Daniel Mettler