Editing Green Party Blogs

These instructions are for editors, and describe both how the site works and how you can edit articles.

Background

The site aggregates lots of different blogs, copying their latest articles over to ours. We use RSS and Atom feeds, which vary from one blog software to another, so some feeds bring in the full article whilst others just provide a teaser.

Newly aggregated blog posts are, by default accessible by anyone via the left-hand column "latest" block. These links out from Green Home to the original blog article. They are all aggregated into a special RSS feed.

Featured posts are then shown on the front page, are open for comments on Green Home, and show up in a special box in the latest blogs list. They also go into the featured blogs RSS feed.

You can change these things by going to edit each article. So say you want an article to be a feature, you just go and edit it, maybe change the first few lines that show up in the teaser on the front page and then tick to promote it.

The technical bit - editing articles

Find an article in the latest blogs list that you want to edit, and if you have permission you should see an 'edit' link next to the published date. If you don't just ask one of the web site administrators to check you have permission!

You can now change the title and body of the article. If you are going to promote this article to the front page, you'll often need to create a new summary - i.e. an introductory few lines that draw a reader in - as our bloggers commonly lack good opening lines. To customise the summary, which will show up on the front page listing of edited blogs, simply place your cursor at the desired split and then click on the "Split summary at cursor" button.

Use Comment settings to disable comments if it's getting a bit heated; read only means people can still at least see existing comments.

The main bit is in Publishing settings, where you can publish/unpublish an article (so editors can see it, but the general public can't); you can also opt to promote the item to the front page to make it a feature on the front page.

The other technical bit - adding new blogs

Green Home has two types of "content"; blog feeds - one for every blogger - and syndicated blog posts. To add somebody's blog to Green Home you need to create a new blog feed for them, and then the site will automatically create new syndicated blog posts every day when the blogger updates their blog.

So... first, go to the create content link in the sidebar:

Next, choose to add a new blog feed.

You need to set the blog title, which would normally be the name of the blogger or, if they prefer to remain anonymous, their pseudonym. This will show up on the right sidebar and on the articles themselves.

Now the complicated bit; you need to make sure all the options are set correctly to syndicate the blog. The important ones are:

• Feed URL - must be a valid RSS or Atom feed, mooch around their blog for the "rss" button and copy the link for the feed;
• Refresh feed on creation - tick this so you can immediately see if blog posts are syndicated properly;
• Update existing feed items - untick this, it's just annoying if old articles are updated thereby overwriting changes we've made to edited/featured blog posts;
• Processors -> Node type - open up the processors section, and make sure that the "nodes" created by this feed are syndicated blog posts;

You finally need to check that newly syndicated blog posts don't automatically get promoted to the front page. Check that this box is unticked in the "Publishing options" section:

Then that's it, you're ready to go! Click to Save and the blog should be added, along with a chunk of newly syndicated blog posts.