After a slow start, we are now rather spoilt for choice when it comes to blogging templates for SharePoint. As well as the one which gets hidden in the bowls of FrontPage, Maurice Pranther wrote a series of articles with samples (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=89) and Jim Duncan is developing a more advanced template at (http://dev.collutions.com/blogs/sample/default.aspx). Combine this with the multitude of list to rss tools you would think that every bloggers desires were filled.
Well sorry, no.
You see the thing is I write a blog to be viewed by people internal to my employer. I’m not writing about stuff that’s company confidential, really I’m just reposting the interesting snippets from the 30 or so weblogs I subscribe to, but I’m putting them into the context of our organisation. I’m told by my readers that this is pretty valuable, rather than getting information cold they get to see something pre-filtered and commented on by the technical architect for that area. SharePoint was clearly the place to start, we’ve already got it, it’s a standard service, all the security, access, scaling, backup etc all exist, I would be crazy to use anything else.
However, until Microsoft ship a free RSS reader in some future Windows version (longhorn was the last rumour I heard) there is no likelihood of my organisation spending money to purchase an RSS reader or adopting a free one from an unsupported source. This means my readers will all be reading my blog in Internet Explorer for the next 2-3 years. I can’t expect people to keep coming back to the site to see my latest pearls of wisdom, they need to have a way of combining my blogs with that of others. Now the SharePoint way of aggregating push information is through subscriptions, generally sent as emails. So I get people to subscribe to the list which makes up the postings to the weblog, sounds easy. Now this is where the wheels start getting wobbly on this wagon.
The FrontPage template I used does not use the standard forms for the list to create it’s displays. The actual page which is the view page for the list doesn’t show comments or much else. The subsciption however always point to this form, so it’s wht my viewers see. After some fiddling and using excellent advice from Mr Pranthers posting I’m able to create something that allows them to see and add comments, well I am supposed to be an MVP so it would be a bit poor if I couldn’t get that far. This is now starting to fly, I’ve subscribed to the comments list so I get notified when someone posts a comment, often they are asking a question so with a bit of fiddlin around I can reply.
The problem is they don’t know I’ve replied so ask me the same question next time I see them around the office. They need to be able to subscribe to replies to their own questions only. The only way I can think to do this involves rather a lot of custom coding, something I don’t like. So near and yet so far, I can nearly create something great using standard templates and some relatively minor stuff in FrontPage. What I need is for SharePoint 3 to come with a blog out-of-the-box with the following features :-
- Visitors can use subscriptions to be notified about posts and replies to comments
- Subscription messages which show the first few lines of any post/comment
- A rich client for making postings, how about an infopath form, I need the ability to spell check before uploading. Or perhaps an email from Oulook ?
- RSS functionality OOTB for when readers do start appearing.
- Oh, and I want Pings/TrackBack functionality.
If anyone has better ways to achieve this then let me know in comments …