Tomble
Active member
I can't even imagine the hacks that Jaxel will have to write to hobble together a complete and powerful blogging system based upon threads, which weren't designed to be blogs! Simple as that. Simple blogging system I can see, but most definitely not an extremely advanced system with all the bells and whistles. I'll just create a CMS based upon threads, sound good? (PS - this wasn't aimed directly at you, its more of a general use threads as data source thing)
That's a good point. The big worry is that for many seperate systems which still exist 'within' the forum such as social groups and blogs within vBulletin caused considerable fragmentation and a reduction in user participation. Having some way to bring these together so that all members can see that content and not get confused as to where they should post, or look for information is a challenge.
Solutions like having the latest five blogs appear in the sidebar seems to work reasonably well, but unless there is a continuous stream of good content people start to ignore it and do not notice when new stuff appears. The same could happen with some sort of thread style notification though.
One idea that I've seen before and struck me as a reasonable idea was to have the content itself neutral so that it can appear equally well in both a thread format and blog format. Naturally as these would be created in the blog interface it probably won't look as good in threads, but it may provide a way for users who just want a 'simple' view of the content to see it and still participate without having to find the blogs. Perhaps having content in the thread view strip out blog specific tags, information and perhaps even images? Much like RSS provides a simple and basic view, the thread view of blog content could do the same thing. And presumably that may not be so hard to implement as I was under the impression that XenForo is designed to cater for the same content being displayed in various forms. Having said that, that could lead to confusion in itself if it wasn't clear, and issues like content duplication. So not an ideal solution, and there is most certainly much better ones I'm sure.
It's all quite specific to how you use your forum and your niche really, so perhaps just keeping it a fairly simple starting point, then others can adapt it to their needs. Anyway I'm sure there is a solution to this issue of fragmentation and confusion that a separate blog system within the forum causes and hopefully Jaxel can solve it .