Setting up a blog with BlogSphere

Should I go with the flow and use an already existing blog template as the most popular BlogSphere instead of making my own? I probably should. How easy is it to set up a blog with BlogSphere? Is it performant enough? Easy to use? Flexible enough to serve my needs?

The BlogSphere template I used is V3.0. The list of developers who contributed to it is quite impressive: Rocky Oliver, Joe Litton, Julian Robichaux, Christian Brandlehner, Ben Poole, Chris Linfoot, Jake Howlett, Mike Golding, Chad Schelfhout, Julien Bottemanne, Paul Mooney, Kevin Pettitt, John Roling, Nathan T Freeman, Roy Holder.

Installation

• Download BlogSphere from www.openntf.org, unzip it and copy the template to the data directory of the server.
• Use the Admin client to sign the template.
• Create a new database based on this template.

When the database opened in Notes, I got this message:

This message will only go away when you create a Full text index, so that's what I did.

Next thing I did was creating a blog entry in the Notes client. There is no web interface for the admin and authoring part at present. Then I opened the blog in a web browser. Too soon, I discovered. I got only the HTML, no default CSS but a few JavaScript errors thrown at me instead. Maybe I should configure it first.

Configuration

In order to access the configuration documents, you have to open the Database Access control and give yourself all the roles. Then you can switch to the configuration:

I opened Blog Setup: Blog Configuration and filled in the blog basics:

I quickly looked at the result in my browser, and Bingo! we have blog. I didn't like the default sideblocks, so I wanted to disable some. This can be done in Look And Feel: Side Blocks. I was very impressed to find out how easy this was:

Emoticons

One very annoying fact was that the paths of the Emoticons were still pointing to http://dev.blogsphere.net/. They should be recalculated, but there is no button to do that. That's a small update to the design. I've added one of my own agents to do this, and luckily there is a way to do this: select all, and run Actions: Dev Utilities: Refresh Selected Documents. Problem solved.

Evaluation

• The performance of the blog template is quite impressive, when you consider that every page has a QueryOpen agent. I recorded 0.5 seconds average load time on my test server.
• The features and configuration possibilities are extremely impressive as well.
• One thing I didn't like: BlogSphere seems to rely on Technorati for its tagging. I would like to tag blog entries in the database itself, which at present does not seem to be possible.

Conclusion

I should compare BlogSphere with the other blog templates available, but I can say that I like BlogSphere a lot. I feel inspired to contribute to its making as well. Building a web interface for the authoring and administration would be quite a challenge :-)