A few members, myself included, are looking for some sort of "content manager" capability with the blog system of [cs]. By "Content Manager" I am meaning that I do not want the individual people to actually make the posts. Rather, I would like to have a "manager" that will publish the post on the authors behalf.

In order to do this with [cs] 2007 you do need to modify some core files. I will show what needs to be done ;p

/ControlPanel/Blogs/CreateEditBlogPost.ascx page

Around line #166 add in the following:

<!-- CarKnee Author Mod-->
<asp:Panel ID="AuthorPanel" runat="server" Visible="false">
    <div class="CommonFormFieldName">
        Author:
    </div>
    <div class="CommonFormField">
        <asp:textbox id="AuthorName" cssclass="ControlPanelTextInputBig" maxlength="256" runat="server" />
    </div>
</asp:Panel>
<!-- END CarKnee -->

In the code behind (/ControlPanel/Blogs/CreateEditBlogPost.ascx.cs) modify it in the following places:

Line 47 Add:

protected TextBox AuthorName;
protected Panel AuthorPanel;

Around Line 176 add this in:

if (CSContext.Current.User.IsBlogAdministrator)
    AuthorPanel.Visible = true;
else
    AuthorPanel.Visible = false;

Line 277 Add:

AuthorName.Text = CommunityServer.Users.GetUser(CurrentWeblogPost.AuthorID, false).Username;
AuthorName.ReadOnly = true;

Around Line 504 look for this: postID = context.PostID; and add this right under it:

string authorname = String.IsNullOrEmpty(AuthorName.Text) ? CommunityServer.Users.GetAnonymousUser().Username : AuthorName.Text;
if (CommunityServer.Users.GetUser(authorname) == null || CommunityServer.Users.GetUser(authorname).IsAnonymous)
  authorname = context.User.Username;
CommunityServer.Components.User u = CommunityServer.Users.GetUser(authorname);

post.AuthorID = u.UserID;
post.Username = authorname;

Around Line 524 look for this:

result = WeblogPosts.Add(post, context.User, out postID);

and change it to this:

result = WeblogPosts.Add(post, u, out postID);

You will need to recompile the core if you make the change to the .cs file.

Comments (2) -

Robert McLaws

Can you post a screenshot for what this looks like? And how will you know when a new post has been submitted? Is there an editor's queue?

Sean Kearney

Hi Robert,
There is no queue or anything special with this. The way we are going to work it is that all submitted "articles" (blog posts) will be emailed to our Content Manager guy. His job will be to clean the article up and make the post as the original author.

The only change to the user interface would be an additional textbox on the "Write a Blog Post" page that allows you to enter in the username of the member who wrote the article.

Does that clear it up?

Comments are closed