The minimal, but highly customizable blogging accelerator that provides simple blogging functionality, based on the helix design principles. This accelerator allows teams to easily add blogging capabilities for clients without having to build things from scratch.
- Define url patterns (permalinks) within configuration to resolve blog items within buckets
- Easily extend blog templates (blog, author, tags, categories) to maintain an upgrade path, but most importantly to bring your own presentation layer
- Self-contained blogging capabilities, the accelerator does not make assumptions about the content tree
- Service/Repository driven design
- Archive Listing
- Blog Listing (Main Blog Listing component)
- Blog Page Header
- Blog Post Detail
- Category Listing
- Open Graph Metadata
- Recent Posts Listing
- Related Posts
- Related Posts - Dynamic
- Tag Cloud
- Tag Lisitng
- Sample Layout this is an example layout, not meant to be used in production
A Sitecore installation package is provided for installing the blog module into your Sitecore environment.
Head over to the release section to the download the latest release, https://github.com/KKings/Sitecore.Feature.Blog/releases. From there use Sitecore's package Installation Wizard to install the package.
To extend the blog module, use NuGet to install the Sitecore.Feature.Blog package as a DevDependency:
Run the following command within the Package Manager Console.
Install-Package Sitecore.Feature.Blog
After installation of the package within an environment, to create a blogging area, simply create an item that is derived from the 'Blog' template. All categories, authors, and tags will be managed in a simple Sitecore Item Bucket.
The blogging accelerator uses custom routing through the use of tokens and resolvers that give the ability to generate any type of URL based on information stored within the bucket. The accelerator will manage all routes underneath a blog template (or inherited template).
Tokens provide the ability to extract data from a URL that then can be used to query or map the URL to an item within Sitecore. All tokens must implement the IToken Interface and be configured at /sitecore/blog/tokens
Out of the box, the blogging module supports the following tokens:
- $slug is mapped to the slug field of an item
- A slug is used to identity a unique item within Sitecore
- $tag is mapped to the Tag Name of a Tag
- Derived from the SlugToken
- $category is mapped to the Category Name of a Category
- Derived from the SlugToken
- $year is mapped to the Post Year of a Post
- $month is mapped to the Post Month of a Post
- $author is mapped to the Author Full Name
- Derived from the SlugToken
- $page is mapped to an integer to provide pagination support
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
<sitecore>
<blog>
<tokens>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.SlugToken, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>slug</friendly>
<token>$slug</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.TagName, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>tag</friendly>
<token>$tag</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.CategoryName, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>category</friendly>
<token>$category</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.PostYearToken, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>year</friendly>
<token>$year</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.PostMonthToken, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>month</friendly>
<token>$month</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.AuthorToken, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>author</friendly>
<token>$author</token>
</token>
<token type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Tokens.PageToken, Sitecore.Feature.Blog">
<friendly>page</friendly>
<token>$page</token>
</token>
</tokens>
</blog>
</sitecore>
</configuration>A resolver resolves the requested url to a configured permalink. A resolver can contain multiple permalinks that it can resolve. All resolvers must implement, IResolver and must be configured at /sitecore/blog/resolvers
Resolvers responsibilities are:
- Map a permalink to the requested url
- Tokenize the request
- Generate an Item Url
- Resolve the Item that matches the permalink
A resolver can contain multiple permalinks that can contain any number of tokens. If a token has been specified within a permalink and it is not found as a configured token, the token will be skipped. Additionally, a Resolver can specify a configured template id that will restrict the search to only return results of that template.
Out of the box, the blogging module comes with two resolvers:
- DefaultResolver - can be used for most cases where the URL can be mapped directly to an Item within Sitecore
- ArchiveResolver - special case resolver that maps the Item Resolved to the parent blog
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
<sitecore>
<blog>
<resolvers>
<resolver desc="post" type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Resolvers.DefaultResolver, Sitecore.Feature.Blog" resolve="true">
<template>{bd48d35d-ae82-4269-8e9e-b21a5f17b363}</template>
<permalinks hint="list">
<permalink>/$year/$month/$slug</permalink>
<permalink>/post/$slug</permalink>
</permalinks>
</resolver>
<resolver desc="tag" type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Resolvers.DefaultResolver, Sitecore.Feature.Blog" resolve="true">
<template>{b05c5f99-615b-46e4-a0f0-fb43e62c404f}</template>
<permalinks hint="list">
<permalink>/tag/$tag</permalink>
<permalink>/tag/$tag/page/$page</permalink>
</permalinks>
</resolver>
<resolver desc="category" type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Resolvers.DefaultResolver, Sitecore.Feature.Blog" resolve="true">
<template>{b8b0484c-f1a9-4a18-afa4-a7b942063d54}</template>
<permalinks hint="list">
<permalink>/category/$category</permalink>
<permalink>/category/$category/page/$page</permalink>
</permalinks>
</resolver>
<resolver desc="archive" type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Resolvers.ArchiveResolver, Sitecore.Feature.Blog" resolve="true">
<template></template>
<permalinks hint="list">
<permalink>/page/$page</permalink>
<permalink>/$year/$month</permalink>
<permalink>/archive/$year/$month</permalink>
<permalink>/archive/$year/$month/page/$page</permalink>
</permalinks>
</resolver>
<resolver desc="author" type="Sitecore.Feature.Blog.Resolvers.DefaultResolver, Sitecore.Feature.Blog" resolve="true">
<template>{702b64d5-58da-475f-843f-5bdf09a40e36}</template>
<permalinks hint="list">
<permalink>/author/$author</permalink>
</permalinks>
</resolver>
</resolvers>
<blog>
<sitecore>
</configuration>The blog.generateAbstractUrl generates URLs for items not found within Sitecore. Currently uses while generating archive links.
The main processor, BlogAbstractUrlMapper is passed a collection of tags (or tokens) and and values of the tags, then resolves against configured permalinks where all tags (or tokens) are resolved.
The blog.resolveUrl pipeline resolves URLs using the Resolvers and Tokens to determine if a resolver can handle the URL and how to map it to current request (BlogContext and Item).
The blog.resolveContext pipeline resolves the BlogContext of the current request, mapping all values found from the URL into the Blog Context.
The blog.linkProvider pipeline is used in conjunction with the Link Provider to provide a pipeline based Link Provider. Processors generate the URLs based on a corresponding resolver that is mapped to a specific template type.
The blog.localDatasource pipeline is used to untokenize a string. Example, this pipeline is called within the Blog Multilist with Search field to limit the current items by the parent blog.
The blog.generateSlug pipeline is used to generate the 'slug' of any item that is derived from the _Slug template. The slug is used in URL resolution to find a specific item based on that slug.