If I didn’t want to over-use the exclamation point I would have added it to the post title, cause this is pretty big. Sueetie now natively supports multiple blogs and all that that implies behind the scenes. We know Sueetie can support multiple blogs, but now we have the ability to create multiple blogs and easily display them, as well as an aggregate display of all site blog posts.
Enough talk, here’s the new Sueetie Site Blogs page. There are three blogs on the site displayed at the top of the page with the aggregate post list below.
The SueetieBlogPost object has been extended to include blog properties so I used those new properties to update the Recent Blog Posts List control on the Sueetie.com home page to display posts from all blogs. Each Sueetie blog now has its own avatar which we can now dynamically display, along with a link to the blog. I added a bonus “View all Blogs” link a the bottom to drive more eyeballs to our new very cool Site Blogs page.
The display of the site blogs and aggregate blog posts is super easy, since it's identical to how other Sueetie Content is handled by the Sueetie List View Controls. Below is the code for displaying the Blogs Page blogs and posts. Look for the <uc:AggregateBlogList /> and <uc:AggregateBlogPostList /> controls.
Here is the AggregateBlogPostList.ascx used by the <uc:AggregateBlogPostList /> control as specified by its “ViewName” property.
Finally we need an administrative function to manage the blog properties. Here’s the new Sueetie Blog Edit form. It was important to support HTML in the blog description field as you see. We can support restricted blogs by assigning a role to the Blog Access Role property. Finally we can specify if we want the blog to be displayed on the Aggregate Blogs page.
Savvy readers will see there’s a bit of work yet to do. There’s no RSS support, for instance, and we want to bring in individual blog post categories and tags, maybe start thinking about global categories while we’re at it. But that’s for another day. Today I’m enjoying the heck out of the latest demonstration Sueetie’s awesome potential, multiple site blogs!