customized .text weblogs release
A most excellent week spent customizing .text 0.94 for a company weblog to track project events has ended with the release of not one, but two separate weblogs now running on the company intranet. The same day the project event weblog was put online I was asked to create a version for proposal activity as well. I was able to “customize the customized version” to track proposal event activity in a couple of days.
To make the .text framework a project event tracking application, the following changes were required:
- Anyone can create a new weblog from active projects from a “Create Project Weblog“ service with the project selected from a dropdownlist. The link is found on the Project weblogs home page.
- SQL data, procs, and .text classes were updated to support addition of project id and user id values for tie-backs to other data.
- RSS Clients are still being evaluated and not on all users' desktops, so to support communications, a weblog subscriber system was implemented. This meant that all posts and all post comments are sent as HTML-formatted emails to that project weblog's subscribers. The email contains entire post, user and project-specific information, and urls to the post or comment.
- To quickly add project team subscribers to any weblog, the creator of the project weblog selects subscribers to the weblog at the time the project weblog is created. There is also a separate Subscriber Administration tab in the Admin section to update the subscriber list.
- Any user can unsubscribe from / subscribe to any weblog at any time through a “Subscriptions“ menu link in the My Links menu block for the project weblog.
- Anyone can post to any project weblog.
- Since anyone can post to any weblog, project-specific and author data must be added on all post lists and emails.
- Links to other project data found outside of the weblog is available in that project's weblog.
The Proposals event weblog and the Project event weblog both use the same .text VS.NET project modules to support future enhancements. I'm hoping users ask for a lot of enhancements so I can spend more time working with ScottW's code!