Announcing the Blog & Podcast plugin

Date: Tue Feb 10 2015

They say every content management system becomes a blogging platform. Whether or not that's true, it's just become true for AkashaCMS. A new AkashaCMS plugin allows the creation of multiple blogs within an AkashaCMS website.

It seemed necessary to develop blogging support for AkashaCMS, so that AkashaCMS could host its own news and announcements feed. Until now I'd been announcing things about AkashaCMS via (davidherron.com) davidherron.com which meant those announcements weren't correctly connected with the AkashaCMS website. The code I recently developed for evwow.com gave a strong start on blogging support, so I decided to make Blogging one of the milestone issues for the AkashaCMS 0.4.x release.

A blog is just a website where there's an index of the content presented in reverse chronological order, and where a machine-friendly index is presented as an RSS file.

Yes, bloggers tend to add other doodads in their sidebars, and I'll get to those eventually. But at its barest minimum a blog is a website where the main index is a river of news as I just described. That's it. There's nothing magical to it.

A few weeks ago, to support evwow.com, I did add a generateRSS method to AkashaCMS. A teensy bit of tweaking was needed to make it support blogs. Then with a bit more work, I adapted some code out of the evwow.com site to create a new AkashaCMS plugin - akashacms-blog-podcast. The plugin is documented elsewhere on this site.

At the moment the Podcast portion of this is aspirational. A podcast is just a blog, with media entries in the RSS feed, and with audio (or video) players embedded on the website. I haven't yet implemented that stuff, but it appears to simply require some custom elements in the RSS feed definition.

This blog post is meant to both test the akashacms-blog-podcast plugin, and to announce its existence. If you see this publicly you'll know the plugin is working.

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