WeBlog 2.1 Released

Today I have made several updates to the WeBlog module for Sitecore and published release 2.1. Go grab it now from http://trac.sitecore.net/WeBlog.

Here’s a few significant changes to the module.

Akismet

Does your WeBlog blog get swamped with spam? Are you wasting lots of manual effort on weeding it out? Then you’ll love this new feature. WeBlog 2.1 introduces Akismet support. Akismet is a commercial service to detect spam from web comments. If the Akismet service identifies the submitted comment as spam the comment is put into the new spam state of the WeBlog workflow. Users can use the workbox to easily review all spam comments and remove them.

Customise the Comment Creation Process

To make it easier to customise the comment creation process a new pipeline has been added. The weblogCreateComment pipeline is run when the comment is submitted. This pipeline creates the comment item, checks if the comment is spam against Akismet and then pushes it through workflow. A developer can easily update the pipeline to adjust how comments are created and processed.

Override the Manager Classes

The manager classes which are responsible for most of the data and content operations in the module have all be extracted behind interfaces which allows developers to override the class. A factory class is used to create concrete instances of the managers from configuration when required. This would allow a developer to, for example, store and retrieve comments from an external DB (future blog post on that in the works).

Set Publish Date Using Live Writer

You can now also set the publish date of your post when using the MetaWeblog API service such as when you use Live Writer.

Conclusion

The WeBlog wiki has also been updated with information about the new features, so you can refer to that for more information. If you have any comments or suggestions for the module, jump onto the WeBlog forum on the SDN and let us know.