Seamless Corporate Blog Integration into TYPO3
- Image: www.blogbiz.de
During the last 8 years Blogs have become more and more important business tools for various reasons.
In the beginning the Blog was a personal tool like a public diary. Then the idea to use the Blog for more or less journalistic texts evolved. Nowadays Blogs are used for various reasons: CEO-Blogs to make the CEO of a company more visible and give the business an emotional touch, marketing Blogs (Political Party Blog, Product Information Blog, ..) Blogs to share knowledge in the intranet of large companies, Blogs to share knowledge on open source projects, pastors Blogs and companies planning to provide personal Blogs to common users. Even the White House has a blog.
For a company needing a Blog to general techniques are possible. They can either install their Blog on an inhouse or external Webserver or can rent a Blog belonging to a blog provider like blogger.com.
The latter is certainly no solution for business planning to share their knowledge in the intranet. Also possibilities of styling are reduced, data-export might be not so easy and you depend on an external service.
The most widely used software for self-hosted weblogs is wordpress. Wordpress cannot be used to run more the one blog in one installation therefore is no solution for starting a professional blog-hosting solution or a larger company where several employees should run their own blog. Even though wordpress is highly functionary on running standard-weblogs it is not so easy to customize for certain special purposes.
Businesses that are already running their main website on TYPO3 might want to seamlessly integrate their (external) corporate blog into their TYPO3 webpage
Integrating Wordpress into TYPO3
One solution is to integrate Wordpress into TYPO3. The easies solution would be to create a reduced Skin for the Wordpress Blog an integrating it by iFrame or such into the TYPO3 Webpage. Also it is possible to generate a Page Header and Footer by TYPO3 and attaching those to Wordpress. In all these solutions You will have two separate backends one for Wordpress and one for TYPO3. This might not matter in cases where the site-admin and the Wordpress authors are different persons. In other cases this means that editors have to learn two systems. Also whenever either TYPO3 or Wordpress or any involved Extension on either side is updated there is the risk of neither system working anymore.
Using t3blog
In the end of 2008 finally a full-service Blog extension was published by the Suisse company snowflake. The extension t3blog, witch only by chance shares the name of the famous TYPO3 Blog t3blog.net, is able to handle multiple Blogs in one installation. It comes with its own templating engine, therefore it is not so easy to integrate it into running projects.
The standard templating of the t3blog should usually be customized by Zen-garden kind of css. Nevertheless this limits the possibilities of customizing the design. The t3blog standard installation is using no HTML Templates and is only configured by TypoScript. The TypoScript is copied several times in the process of creating the output. I wrote a templating engine for t3blog: lot3blog. This extension brings a default kubrik template and makes it possible to use HTML templates in t3blog.
T3Blog has capsulated functionalities in “widgets”, for example a widget for the archive, a widget for the latest comments and so on. Unfortunary most widgets only work when used on the very page where the Blog is lying. When you create a new widget you cannot do this in another extension but always have to modify the extension itself. Therefore updates become complicated.
What is a Blog anyway?
Shortly speaking: The content defines the Blog. A Blog contains active, dynamical data, usually ordered by date. The content is often more personal and informal then in other Media. This content can in most cases be commented. Readers can be informed of new Posts by RSS / Atom –Feeds. Linking Blogs to each other and the internet is very important. Trackbacks and Pingbacks can be used to inform another Blog of that you have linked to it. The Blogroll is a list of favourite other Blogs or Pages. It becomes more and more important of automatically pinging certain services, connect to Twitter, include youtube videos and other web 2.0 webpages.
What is a trackback?
In a trackback you publish a certain Url under your blog post. Another webpage will call this trckback and send some information about itself. Your Blog can text then weather the sending page really contains a link to the receiving page. Then the receiving page can include a link to the sending page. The sending page will be informed by simple XML weather the trackback was received successfully.
Trackbacks have to be implemented in both directions: sending and receiving. While this sounds like to sides of the same problem actually the receiving of the trackback first takes back in the frontend and has to be saved in the database then, the sending of trackbacks will be usually triggered by some backend module.
And a Pingback?
While the trackback has to be send manually, a pingback is an auto detect service for links. When a Blog Post is saved the system automatically checks all outgoing links. If the pages either send the following in their header:
X-Pingback: wordpress.als-webseite.de/xmlrpc.php
Or contains the following meta-tag:
<link rel="pingback" href="http://wordpress.als-webseite.de/xmlrpc.php" />
It can be pinged. (Note that the Meta-Tag HAS to be written exactly as stated above, with the exact amount of whitespace. This should make it easier for programmers to implement pingback detection without having to produce a complete DOM-Model.)
The pinging and reactions function similar like the trackbacks. They also have the same problems in implementation.
Pinging Google
The most important possibility of pingbacks is pinging Google. This way a breaking new story in a Blog might make it to page one in Google withing hours, sometimes minutes. Several webservices can be pinged. If your blog does not implement pinging you can manually ping other services with http://pingomatic.com/. It is much convenient to have automatical pinging though. In Wordpress this is achieved by pinging http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ . I have not tried weather this service can be pinged by TYPO3 but I assume it can. If not so there are several web services to ping out there. They in return are a resource for Google.
T3Blog Installation
Required, in that order:
- Dam
- Pagebrowser
- typoscripttools
- Sfpantispam
- typo3/mod/tools/em/index.php?CMD[showExt]=t3blog&SET[singleDetails]=infot3blog
Sugested:
- seo_basics
- typo3/mod/tools/em/index.php?CMD[showExt]=linkhandler&SET[singleDetails]=infolinkhandler
- typo3/mod/tools/em/index.php?CMD[showExt]=lot3blog&SET[singleDetails]=infolot3blog
tt_news with comments
Required
- tt_news
- Comments
Suggested:
- seo_basics
- lonewsseo: Metatags, Titletag and custom paths for posts
- newsbreadcrumb
- commentBe: Backend nodule for comments, not perfect yet ;-)
- typo3/mod/tools/em/index.php?CMD[showExt]=linkhandler&SET[singleDetails]=infolinkhandler: intern linking to posts
Needed:
- Better Backend Module for comments
- Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Examples
Wordpress integration in TYPO3:
http://www.stonebriar.org/blog/
tt_news based Blogs
t3blog based blogs
Literature
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
(de) Sven Losonc: „Pingback für TYPO3?”
http://t3o.org/2008/12/pingback-fur-typo3/
(de) Sven Losonc: „Kein Pingback für TYPO3?“
http://t3o.org/2009/03/kein-pingback-fur-typo3/
(de) Kronn.de: “Trackback vs. Pingback”
http://kronn.de/weblog/2004/09/18/trackback-vs-pingback/
(en) TrackBack Technical Specification (2004)
http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/docs/trackback_spec
(en) Manually Pinging Webservices
(en) Pinging Updating Services
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
Timtab
(de) Tim Lochmüller: “TIMTAB Imperium”
http://typo3blogger.de/timtab-imperium/
Books
(de) Arnold Picot, Tim Fisher „Weblogs professionell“ dpunkt.verlag 2006 Usage of weblogs in the society, some technical and psychological details, not aiming at a certain system
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