Hi Everybody,

We want to offer our users the ability to create learning diaries (blogs) for our learning community and sync this with AS. At the moment we also offer a series of whitepapers with comment, rating, etc for which we have used Engage so far. Hence we need both blogging + standard news article functionality - all in sync with AS.

For the news part, I am not really happy with Engage as it has many limitations (also, no source code available). We haven't started with the learning blogs yet, either, so I'd like to replace Engage with a more flexible news article which also could cover the blogging for the users.

Features for the news module :
- thumbnails/headers/teasers in multiple columns (news portal frontpage layout)
 ... from what I see most of the news modules only allow you to publish the articles lists in one column at the time
- slideshow of the latest articles, most read articles, etc ...
- versioning
- scheduled publishing + category archives
- integration with the AS journal

Features for the blog module:
- someone please hear my dream and invent a WP clone in DNN ... ;-)

Now, I like where Steven is going with his blog, so if anyone has similar experience, it would be great to hear some experiences.

- Frank

Hi Frank,

The Active Forums has got a blog template which is also run over here on this website. Pretty simple, but it will do for me (for now). I hope that the upcoming release of Active Forums will incorporate the archiving and scheduled publishing because AF should integrate nicely with AS.

I know two modules (and there are probably many more) that provide you with the opportunity to enter your blogs through WLW. They usually support the core Blog and Ventrian News Articles module. It would be great if the AM team would create native support for WLW to enter content in both AF & AS, but I really would appreciate if they would come up with support for Google Wave

Marc,

How are you using the AF blog template for AS profile blogs? I thought we were waiting for AF 5 which will allow the filter on userid we need to allow that to happen.

thanks,

Will

Hi Will,

I guess I didn't express myself correctly. The AF blogs are not integrated with AS at this moment but I only have a forum that shows all blogs with the forum viewer from the main page. So I believe that you're right about the waiting for AF5 for filtering capabilities.

I use both the core blog module and ventrian news articles. For my social site...I plan to migrate to AF 5 once this functionality is supported. I use Ventrian for stand alone blogs with Windows Live Writer and it pretty much rocks.

We are using Ventrian News Articles as well. It has a lot of great features for blogging in general. There is also a demo on these forums someplace about integrating a users blog posts into their profile page.

I have yet to see an integration with the Journal though. That would be valuable.

Once the "final final" version of the journal is done (1.3) I plan to figure out how to integrate both News Articles posts and Property Agent entries into the journal. While we'll move blogs from core to AS we plan to use NA and PA heavily for "site level" content.

What I am thinking is to be able to make NA/PA posts from AS's journal with required fields from NA or PA and then to be displayed/modified in NA or PA. How convenient it would be for users. And as a website, it makes users to think they can manage everything from one place. Wonder if this is something I can hope for...

In general Ventrian news articles is the best dotnetnuke module I have experienced, and is by far the highest quality product for what you need, Scott is truly awesome and his modules rock AND he provides source. Extremely stable, bug free, very mature, unparalleled templating engine. He works at half his normal rate if you would like to sponsor an addition to the module, and because of that our company for one is dedicated to sticking with Ventrian and just sponsoring any additions we need. For instance, we have him adding an rss import function in admin settings that will allow you to import any rss feeds into the db for display via the ventrian news mod while assigning authors, categories etc.

There are some others with interesting features, the next best in line in my opinion is Ultra News Articles by bizmodules,which is another great company, but there are quite a few decent news and blog mods out there at that level.

To put it in perspective we have used Ventrian for about 2 years now and I have been to the forums a few times for feature requests, but as far as I remember never once for a bug.

Posted By Frank Wedde on 28 Oct 2009 03:07 PM
Hi Everybody,

Features for the news module :
- thumbnails/headers/teasers in multiple columns (news portal frontpage layout)
 ... from what I see most of the news modules only allow you to publish the articles lists in one column at the time
- slideshow of the latest articles, most read articles, etc ...
- versioning
- scheduled publishing + category archives
- integration with the AS journal

figured it would be nice to respond directly to your needs too...

- thumbnails/headers/teasers - ventrian na does this
- columns - use the Ventrian satellite mod along with the columns in your site or page skin
- slideshow - not native but easy enough, visit dynamicdrive.org or find a slideshow script along with the templating capability in ventrian mod and this surely can be produced, might also check snowcovered
- versioning - not supported, moderation is supported but not versioning
- scheduled publishing - start and end date can be defined which I assume accomplishes this request
- category archives - this is supported in addition to author and datetime archives
- integration with as journal - not that I know of, though the satellite mods can easily be tied into the AS tabs, the AS journal seems for now a closed system that does not integrate, a closer look might reveal that not to be true, and surely I would guess in the future they will offer an API to get info into the journal, but integration would need to come from the AS side first.

Great guys + thanks Jason for the specifics :-)

Has anyone investigated this blog module?

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcove...geID=13866

Try this link too

http://demo.sunblognuke.net/Demo_Bl...id/46.aspx

and the authors on right panel - that is using "authorid" in url. Would that work for AS?

thanks,

Will

I'm also curious about this. Have things changed in the last few months? Has anyone tried to integrate a news/blogs modules into the AS tabs? Thanks,

I'm pretty committed to Ventrian News Articles for News Articles. But I'm hopeful we'll see a more integrated blogging solution within AS shortly. I'd rather use that for profile/user blogs so everything is in one place.

SunBlog does look pretty cool.

Posted By Lee on 16 Apr 2010 09:10 AM
I'm also curious about this. Have things changed in the last few months? Has anyone tried to integrate a news/blogs modules into the AS tabs? Thanks,

Lee,

I think this is what you are looking for:

Screencast from Steven Webster: http://www.screencast.com/users/Air...3dbcf14c8b

And read this thread for 3rd party integrations: http://www.activemodules.com/Commun...fault.aspx

Thanks Jeff,
That was exactly what I was looking for!

I can't seem to find the querystring option on the latest version of Ventrian's News Articles.

For users following this thread:
The function was just moved down the page a bit, now it’s Filter Settings -> Author Filter Settings -> UserID Filter (Check this) and change UserID Parameter to (asuid).

Also,
Is anyone else integrating the latest version of Ventrian's News Articles (00.07.64) successfully with AS? I keep getting errors with Ventrian's NA, but BizModule's UVG is working perfectly.

I can not get NA (0.7.61) working with AS either. I had PA working without a problem, but not NA. I used to think that was caused by the second tab I added for NA, but after I removed all the other tabs except for NA, it still didn't work. I simply can not integrate NA with AS.