An exciting new function in CS 2.1 is Blog Mirroring, enabling multiple blogs to be re-syndicated, or mirrored as a single blog. You can see an example of this with the
Syndicated Telligent Blogs at communityserver.org.
In
a public CS Forums thread, it was asked whether the roller was integrated into blogs in 2.1, since they are similar in appearance. Here is ScottW's reply outlining some key features in CS 2.1 Blog Mirroring.
- For example, how are the tags applied? We read the tags/categories specified in the category rss element. In addition. we scan the body of the post for any anchor elements with the attribute rel = "tag". In short, they are automatic.
- Also, can mirrored items be deleted on an item-by-item basis? You can defintely delete items, but on the next refresh, we may accidently re-insert it. You will probably just need to mark an item as unpublished to keep it from showing up on your site.
- Can they be published on an item-by-item basis, so that a blog moderator can review items in an RSS feed and accept only those deemed most interesting? Not in CS 2.1. There is currently no moderation process. You could probably add a CSModule which would mark all "roller" posts as requiring moderation.
- Digg features. Not directly. We have some ideas to help assure interesting/popular topics float to the top and stay there for awhile which we are prototyping/testing now. Hopefully we will have an update in a week or two.
Another informative description of mirrored blogs and how they compare to the blog roller feature was written by Kevin Harder in
another forums thread:
Blog Mirroring is a more advanced version of the Blog Roller feature included in CS 2.0. It allows CS to pull RSS feeds from anywhere and save the content inside of a normal blog on CS. Using this, you could set up your master individual blog with various categories (renamed to Tags in CS 2.1) for each of your desired topics. Then you create your posts there, tagging each post with the appropriate category(ies). In CS, every category and combination of tags has a RSS feed. So you could setup blog mirroring on each of the topic sites to pull the RSS feed for the category/tags desired and display it in a blog there.
[tags: Community Server, CSBlogMirroring]