A new requirement for our customer portal is to add blogging.
Our marketing team have been using Typepad, so they want a platform that is just as easy to use. But we also need a tool that can integrate with our Umbraco/Confluence site and one that can use our existing security.
Someone else on the team is looking at Umbraco, but I thought I’d share what I learned about blogging in Confluence.
1. Blog posts can be published from any space
Blog posts can be created from any space in your Confluence site with the right permissions. You can allow individual users, or groups of users, permission to create posts, and you can give some users permission to comment, and others permission to just view posts.
In our case, to start with, we want a single user to post updates for all the divisions in our company. The easiest way to do this it seems, is to set up a separate space for the blog.
2. Adding a blog post
Adding a blog post is just as simple as you’d expect. Simply browse to the appropriate space, click Add, and then Blog Post. Give the post a title, type in your entry, and click Save, just like you would for a Confluence page.
3. Displaying blogposts
To display blog posts, use the Blog Posts macro. You can restrict the posts displayed by label, author, time frame, and space, and you can sort the order that the posts appear. You can also choose whether to show just the title, or the title and an excerpt.
4. Moderating comments
There is no built-in way to moderate comments in Confluence 3.5, but you can install a beta plug-in (Confluence Comment Moderation). I installed the plugin, and once I’d found the Comment Moderation settings in the Space Admin panel, it worked for me.
One thing I’m still searching for, is a method for automatically pushing Confluence blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. Has anyone found a way to do this?
Resources:
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Photo via Flickr user Heike Quosdorf
Any idea on what windows clients can be used to blog with Confluence?
I’m using IE or Firefox. Are you meaning a client other than a web browser?
To push Confluence blog posts to Facebook/Twitter we use the RSS feed created with the Feed Builder in Hootsuite, which pushes the posts to Ping.fm – this then sends them on to Facebook/Twitter and various other sites.