BlogFusion: The Tool for Community Blogging

Oct 15, 2007

by Ben Nadel

There are two kinds of people in this world: those that blog and those that don't. The ones that do are going to want to know about BlogFusion. Originally created as a personal project by Jake McKee, BlogFusion was taken over by BrainBand Technology Services and fleshed out into a full-featured, community-based blogging system. A relative newcomer to the "blogosphere," BlogFusion is a bit rough around the edges, but I am sure that with just a bit of time and polishing, it will become a stunning application.

BlogFusion comes with all the basic tools – rich text editor, tagging, categories, mini-calendar and RSS feeds. But what makes BlogFusion exciting is not the stuff that it has in common with every other blogging solution – what makes it exciting is all the features that set it apart. Its community-based blogging, multiple text editor options, amazing control over both the CSS and HTML content, XML-RPC support, and extensive RSS feed creation command praise and respect.

BlogFusion provides a way for blogs of similar focus to all exist within the same portal. These portals provide a single interface in which to search, read posts, and create customized RSS feeds. As an alternative to random collections of RSS feeds and customized Google searches, BlogFusion serves up entire communities of people who are blogging about your exact interests and hobbies. Not only does this provide the average user with a more meaningful web experience, it creates a sense of connection and closeness amongst people who would otherwise exist alone in the vast world that is the net.

Behind every community portal, there are good blogs. And behind every good blog there is a good rich text editor. In the race for free, web-based rich text editors, there are currently two front-runners: FCKEditor and TinyMCE. Each of these editors is a variation on the holy grail of web application development – the "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) editor that produces clean, valid HTML through a Word-like interface. Most people have experience with one or the other, and to better accommodate everyone, BlogFusion provides both editors as well as a plain-text option. Furthermore, your choice of text editor can be changed at any time depending on your comfort zone and what you need to accomplish.

In addition to full content control, BlogFusion also provides a high level of control over the look and feel of your blog and portal site through fully customizable CSS and partially customizable HTML. While some of the HTML is locked down for the purpose of maintaining proper functionality, you can edit much of the HTML surrounding the primary (blog and photo gallery) and secondary (RSS, notes, links, calendar, etc.) feature modules. In addition, you can add any HTML you want to the header of each page. While the HTML is somewhat limited, the CSS is completely up to you; you can tweak what they start you off with, or you can completely erase it and start from scratch. Due to the fairly well-architected HTML, I found that in most cases, updating the CSS was sufficient to achieve my personal look and feel.

Of course, editing HTML and CSS directly is a rather advanced feature that your average run-of-the-mill blogger will not need. For those who are not experienced web developers, BlogFusion provides an easy setup that allows the blogger to select from prefabricated site templates. The system also provides a very clean, intuitive interface for selecting and setting up the secondary content modules. These modules include personal information, categories, notes, links, polls, photos, iTunes, NetFlix, and news side bars. Whether you are using a provided site template or a completely customized setup, design elements can be tweaked or changed at any given time.

One of the biggest drawbacks to any advanced web-based application is that it has to use the web. The web is simply limited in comparison to the desktop applications that people use every day. BlogFusion uses the XML-RPC (XML remote procedure call) standard to allow its users to utilize the power of desktop applications, such as Ecto (ecto.kung-foo.tv) and BlogJet (www.codingrobots.com/blogjet), to actually write blog entries and post them to the web. This makes maintaining your site just as easy as opening up Outlook or Microsoft Word.

Once you start posting blog entries and photos to your site, syndicating the content can be done quite easily through RSS feeds. BlogFusion allows end users to create standard, category-based RSS feeds as well as search-based RSS feeds. These search-based RSS feeds are really cool because they basically give end users the power to create fully-customized RSS feeds based on the exact kind of content they are seeking.

I was able to accomplish most everything that I wanted to, in terms of blog setup and maintenance, but not everything was a piece of cake. At first, all of my posts were being flagged as "delayed publishing". No matter what I did, I could not get these posts to go live. I was even more confused by the fact that the link labeled "publish" actually flagged the post as "draft" and the link labeled &qupt;draft" actually flagged the post as "published". After consulting with their technical support team, we figured out that I was in the wrong timezone. I can't remember if timezone setup was part of the initial blog setup, but if it wasn't, it probably should be.

Once that was solved, I was able to start blogging, which quickly uncovered another annoyance - the TinyMCE editor kept inserting bad image source values so that images would show up in the editor itself, but once saved, would not show up on the blog. Switching over to the FCK Editor fixed this. When I started to customize the look and feel of my blog, I found that the only way I could upload images for use with the CSS was through one of the rich text editor interfaces: in order to accomplish this, I had to act as if I was posting a blog entry, attempt to insert an image into the content, upload a new image, copy the source of the uploaded image from the editor's dialog box, cancel out of the blog posting, go back to the CSS page, and paste the copied image source into my CSS rules. Needless to say, this was a very roundabout way to accomplish a task that could easily be taken care of with a rudimentary file management system. This, however, is where the hassles ended. Once I figured out which editor was right for me, how to set the timezone, and how to leverage the rich editors for use with my CSS, the rest – posting blogs, photos, and configuring my secondary content pods – was easy.

Overall, BlogFusion provides a very nice blogging solution for both the single blogger and the community blogger. It boasts all the functionality of a standard blog as well as some features that clearly set it apart. While some of the interfaces are a tad inconsistent and some of the functionality could be more user friendly, I have been assured by BrainBand that most all of the concerns I raised during my testing were already being updated for the next release. Even with some minor tweaking required, BlogFusion's services should be considered by new and existing bloggers alike. For more information about setting up a blog or a blog portal (or to simply create a free blog), check out http://www.blogfusion.com. If you are a ColdFusion programmer like myself, and you want to be part of the ColdFusion blogosphere, check out http://www.cfblog.com, where you can read ColdFusion-related blogs or set up one for yourself.

Ben Nadel has worked with ColdFusion for eight years and is a super ColdFusion enthusiast. He blogs regularly about all aspects of web development on his personal site, http://www.bennadel.com, and does his best to give back to the ColdFusion community through online code demos and his "Ask Ben" blog posts. He is also a Certified Advanced ColdFusion MX7 developer and is one of the lead programmers at Nylon Technology.

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