Contents: Downloading the file Creating a database Opening the Administrator panel Clearing out the junk Customizing the design Running a blog in DomBlog Resources About the author Rate this article Related content: Domino blogging: Blogs and blogging Domino blogging: Domino Blog Domino blogging: BlogSphere Domino blogging: Basic vocabulary Subscriptions: dW newsletters dW Subscription (CDs and downloads)

David DeJean
Partner, DeJean & Clemens
09 Sep 2004

DomBlog by Jake Howlett of Codestore.net is one of several Notes applications that you can download to start your own Web log or blog. Find out how easy it is to use this application to start your own Domino blog.

DomBlog is the work of Jake Howlett, Domino developer and proprietor of Codestore.net. The DomBlog database is donationware: If you use it for any productive purpose, Howlett asks that you make a donation to his favorite charity. The latest version available on the Codestore.net site is v1.6, and it hasn't been updated in some time. Howlett says this is probably the reason there aren't as many people using DomBlog as there used to be: "I left it alone once it got to the point where it worked. The idea with the template -- and everything else I release -- is that people learn from it. However, most people don't want to do anything for themselves and just want all the features constantly updated."

The result is that DomBlog doesn't have some of the latest features, like trackback. But there are still many positives. DomBlog is the simplest of the three templates and the easiest for a Domino developer to customize. Even though it may lack bells and whistles, it covers the basics and has one great advantage: All the functions of the blog can be performed in a Web browser, from creating blog entries to managing comments -- something Domino Blog and BlogSphere don't do.

Getting DomBlog up and running is straightforward. Here are some tips for setting it up and customizing it that will save you some time.

Downloading the file
You can download a zipped file from Codestore.net. The zip contains one file, domblog.nsf.

Creating a database
To create a blog database from the unzipped domblog.nsf file, first open it (or, preferably, make a copy and open that) in the Notes client or in Domino Designer and set the ACL: Add yourself with Manager access and the Administrator role and give yourself permission to delete documents. Save the file.

Now you can make a new copy of domblog.nsf on a Domino server and open it up in a Web browser. The default view shows the blog entries:

Figure 1. DomBlog

You can see that the database presents the elements of a basic blogging application in a very clean design. The blog posts appear in reverse chronological order. Click the headline or the Read/Add link at the bottom of each post to open it along with any associated comments in a new window that includes an editor for creating and submitting comments.

The navigation panel displays a logo graphic, a search box, a calendar with the dates of blog entries highlighted and a list of month-by-month links to archives. Below that appears the blogroll, links to the About document and an FAQ, and finally an icon for the RSS file that is automatically recreated with each new blog entry.

Opening the Administrator panel
All you or any visitor can do from the default view is read blog entries and post comments. To administer the site, you need to open a different view:

(You'll probably want to change the name of this view in your application because it functions as the administration password.)

This opens a view of all the comments that have been posted in response to blog entries and adds a box for the available actions to the navigation panel:

Figure 2. DomBlog navigation panel

Select one of the comments and the available actions will change:

Figure 3. Navigation panel

You can manage all the content of the database across the Web from this interface (including uploading image resources) -- one of the best things about DomBlog.

Clearing out the junk
The DomBlog file is a database, not a template, and Howlett has included several example blogs and comment posts and a short blogroll as examples, as well as several documents that are used as system settings. You'll be tempted to open the database up in the Notes client in the All Documents view and to do a mass delete. Don't.

The safe way to clean out this underbrush is to delete the blog posts and comments one document at a time through the administrative interface.

Customizing the design
The first steps in customizing DomBlog for your own blog is to edit all the items included on the Application Settings list. Click App Settings in the action box to see the list:

Figure 4. Application Settings

Click an item link to open it and then edit as necessary. Some of these items, such as the About and FAQs, are used in the blog, and others, for instance BlogImage and BlogDescription, are used in the RSS feed that is automatically created by the application.

DomBlog is built on subforms, so the look of the application is readily customizable, but its functionality is less so. Here's a DomBlog-based blog with some small but telling changes in its appearance:

Figure 5. Time's Telescope

The navigation column is created by two subforms: pt_html_div-menu_start and pt_html_div-menu_end. You can edit these in Domino Designer.

We started by replacing the logo in the upper left corner. It is created by an image resource named logo.gif. We simply deleted the DomBlog logo and replaced it with one of our own with the same name. The search box and button are 190 pixels wide, which sets the width for a logo. If we had wanted to do something more drastic, we could have done it in the pt_html_div-menu_start subform.

We used the DomBlog logo to create a Powered by DomBlog icon in a graphics program, then added it to the database as an image resource. We added this new icon to the end of the menu column by editing the pt_html_div-menu_end subform. We hid the paragraph that contains the "Designed by Jake Howlett of CodeStore" credit line from the Web and instead added an image tag that displays the Powered by DomBlog icon with a link to a new page named codestore:

We created the codestore page as a new Application Settings page. This was a multi-step process that followed the way the About document works in the database: The About document in a DomBlog database combines field values, content, and subforms. It gets its content from an Application Setting document named About. To create an acknowledgement page for Codestore.net, we created a new Application Settings document of the General type, named it codestore and entered the text, "This blog is published using DomBlog, a free blogging template for the IBM Lotus Domino server available from Codestore.net."

Then we made a copy of the About form, named it codestore, and edited its computed text fields so that the Application Settings document named codestore is picked up to provide the form's content when it is displayed.

Running a blog in DomBlog
DomBlog provides an effective interface for managing a structurally simple blog in a Web browser. The flip side of that simplicity is that it makes some demands on the user. Here is a blog entry opened for editing:

Figure 6. Time's Telescope in edit mode

The controls provide good flexibility: You can set a blog entry to be published immediately or on a future date or save it as a draft. (The final button labeled Save allows you to edit a published entry without changing its publication date.)

There are limitations. Blog entries must be formatted by embedded HTML tags, so even the plainest of plain-text blogs will require some HTML knowledge, and including a graphic image will require some knowledge of the way Domino handles resources. The URL for the eye in the Time's Telescope entries, for example, is:

DomBlog is somewhat command driven, and you may want to write a cheatsheet of the commands you need to remember, like the view name postsadmin (or whatever you call this view) to display the action box and the image tag formulation based on the view name rsrc.

Resources

• Domino blogging: Blogs and blogging
  
  
• Domino blogging: Domino Blog
  
  
• Domino blogging: BlogSphere
  
  
• Domino blogging: Basic vocabulary
  
  
• Read the developerWorks blogs.
  

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