Blogs

A hub has three kinds of blog, and all three store their posts in the same place. The site blog lives at /blog and is written by hub staff. A member blog is the Blog tab on a member's profile, at /members/<id>/blog. A group blog is the Blog tab inside a group, at /groups/<cn>/blog. Every post is a row with a scope (site, member, or group) and a scope ID (0 for the site, the member's or group's ID otherwise), so the Blog Manager in the administrator interface reaches all of them. The Hub users book covers writing posts.

Whether your hub needs it

A blog post is dated, signed, and finished. It says what happened, on a day, and then it stops being current — a release note, a downtime notice, a write-up of a workshop. That is the whole of what this component is good at, and it is genuinely useful for it: a hub with no other way of saying "we upgraded the solver on Tuesday" ends up saying it in an email nobody keeps.

The typical case: you are taking the hub down for four hours on Saturday to move it to new hardware. Write it as a site blog post, publish it, and every member and every group has one address to point at.

Against its siblings, the line is time. A blog post is right when the date is part of the meaning. When it is not — when a reader a year from now still needs the information to be true — the Knowledge base or the Wiki is the right place, because a blog post nobody has revisited is indistinguishable from one that is still accurate. Blogs do not compete with Answers or the Forum at all: a post has one author and comments underneath, not a conversation.

What it is not: it is not the article manager. Articles in Content build the hub's static pages — About, Policies, Contact. Blog posts are a dated stream with their own listing at /blog and their own feed. Managers reach for the wrong one about half the time.

Most of a hub's blogging happens without a manager touching this screen at all. Member and group blogs are written by their owners; the Blog Manager exists mainly so you can find a post someone else wrote, unpublish something that should not be up, or delete a spam post from a member who has since been blocked.

Open it under Components > Blog. Two sub-menu links sit at the top left: Entries and Comments.

Entries

The Entries screen lists every post on the hub, whatever its scope. The columns are ID, Title, Author, State, Created, Comments, and Scope. Click a column heading to sort by it; click again to reverse the order. The list is sorted by title ascending until you change it.

The Comments column is two cells. The first is an on/off switch that toggles whether the post accepts comments; clicking it saves immediately. The second reads "n comment(s)" and opens the Comments screen filtered to that post. The Scope column prints the raw scope and scope ID, as in member (1042).

The filter bar above the list offers:

• Search — matches the post title only, not its content. Type a term and press Go, or press Clear to reset.
• Scope — Site, Member, or Group. The choices are read from the adapter files in the component, so they follow whatever scopes the code supports.
• State — All States, Unpublished, Published, or Trashed.
• Access — one of the hub's viewing levels.

The toolbar offers:

• Options — the component's configuration; see Options.
• Publish and Unpublish — set the state of the checked posts.
• Delete — remove the checked posts after a confirmation.
• Edit — open the checked post. Clicking a title does the same.
• New — create a post.
• Help — the built-in help screen.

Creating or editing an entry

The edit screen is in two halves. Details on the left:

Field	Notes
Scope	Site, Member, or Group. Editable while the post is new; afterwards only an administrator with the Admin permission can change it, and the form shows a warning that changing scope may break references to uploaded files.
Scope ID	The member ID or group ID the post belongs to. Leave 0 for the site blog. Follows the same rule as Scope.
Title	Required. Up to 250 characters.
Alias	Optional. The last segment of the post's URL. Left blank, it is generated from the title: lowercased, trimmed to 100 characters, punctuation removed, spaces replaced by hyphens.
Content	Required. The post body, in the editor.
Tags	Optional, comma-separated.

The panel on the right shows the post's ID, Creator, Created date, and Hits, none of which you can edit, followed by the publishing options:

Field	Notes
Allow comments	Whether members may comment on the post.
Access	Which viewing level a visitor needs: Public, Registered, or another level defined on the hub.
State	Unpublished, Published, or Trashed.
Publish up	When the post starts being visible. Set automatically to now on a new post.
Publish down	When the post stops being visible. Leave blank for no end.

Press Save to save and stay on the form, Save & Close to return to the list, or Cancel to discard changes.

Comments

The Comments screen lists comments and replies as an indented tree, oldest first. The columns are ID, Comment (the first 90 characters of the text, stripped of markup), Author, Anonymous, and Created. A search box filters on the comment text.

Reaching the screen from the sub-menu lists comments from every blog post on the hub. Reaching it by clicking a post's comment count limits the list to that post, and the post's scope and title appear in a header row above the columns.

The toolbar offers Delete, Edit, New, and Help. There are no publish buttons here; a comment's state is set on its edit form.

A comment's edit form has an Anonymous checkbox — which hides the commenter's name and picture from other members, though the record still carries who wrote it — and a required Content field. The panel beside it shows the comment's ID, creator, creation date, and the entry number it belongs to, and lets you set the State: Unpublished, Published, Trashed, or Flagged. A flagged comment stays on the page but its text is replaced with a notice that it has been reported. Saving returns you to the comment list for that entry.

Unpublishing a post you did not write

The job that brings a manager here: a member's blog post is spam, or a group post names someone it should not, and you need it off the site now.

1. Go to Components > Blog. Press Clear first — the filters remember themselves from your last visit and will hide the post you are looking for.
2. Set Scope to Member or Group, whichever it is, and search the title. The Scope column prints the scope and its ID, so member (1042) tells you which member's blog it is on.
3. Check the row and press Unpublish.

The post is off the site immediately — its URL now refuses anyone without manage rights — and the row is untouched — the author's text, comments, and uploaded files all remain. Pressing Publish puts it back. That reversibility is why unpublishing is the right first move even when you are fairly sure the post should go.

If the member's account is the problem rather than the post, blocking the account handles the blog too: plg_members_blog trashes a member's posts when the account is blocked without approval, and deletes them when the account is deleted.

Options

The Options button opens the component's configuration, grouped into four tabs. Basic sets the blog's title and the upload path for files attached to site-blog posts (/site/blog by default). Archive chooses which posts the site blog at /blog pulls in — site only, member only, group only, or all three — and how long an intro each entry gets in a listing and whether its markup is stripped. Entry sets the defaults for showing authors, allowing comments, and which date to print. Feeds enables the RSS feeds and chooses whether feed items carry the full post or a 300-character excerpt. Every option is listed with its values in the configuration reference.

The one setting worth a decision is Archive: which posts the site blog at /blog pulls in. Pulling in member and group posts fills a quiet hub's front-page feed, but it also puts a member's personal writing on the hub's own blog, which they may not have expected. Site only is the default, the safer setting, and the one to keep unless you have told members otherwise. Changing it takes effect on the next page load and is undone by changing it back.

The Permissions tab controls who may administer the component, manage it, and create, delete, edit, change the state of, or edit their own entries and comments. The permission set is defined separately for the component as a whole, for entries, and for comments.

Member and group blogs

Member and group blogs are rendered by plugins, and each is configured in its own place:

• The member blog is plg_members_blog, under Extensions > Plugins > Members - Blog. Its parameters set whether the Blog tab appears on profiles, the upload path (/site/members/{{uid}}/blog), intro length and whether intros are stripped of markup, and the feed defaults. A member overrides the feed settings for their own blog from the Settings button on their blog page.
• The group blog is plg_groups_blog, under Extensions > Plugins > Groups - Blog. Alongside the same intro and feed parameters it sets the default plugin access (any visitor, registered users, group members only, or off), whether the Blog tab shows in the group menu, and whether all members or only managers may post. A group manager overrides posting and feed settings from the Settings button inside the group's blog.

The member plugin also trashes a member's posts automatically when the account is blocked without being approved or its address is prefixed SPAM_, and deletes them when the account is deleted. The group plugin deletes a group's posts when the group is deleted.

API

The component exposes GET /api/blog/list, POST /api/blog, GET /api/blog/{id}, PUT /api/blog/{id}, and DELETE /api/blog/{id}. See the API reference.