A Visual Tour of BlogFusion's Features

 
Oct 15, 2007

by Ben Nadel

Setting up a free blog with BlogFusion takes about 60 seconds and consists of three easy steps.

Step 1: select your login credentials:



Step 2: Enter the name of your blog and the URL that you would like to use:




Step 3: Select your initial site design template:



Step 3 above requires you to choose an initial design; however, once your blog is created, BlogFusion gives you excellent control over the look and feel of both the blog portal and over the individual blogs. Customizing the HTML and CSS of my blog, I was able to take this prefabricated template design:




And completely alter it to reflect the twisted workings of my inner mind:




Of course, you don't have to alter the design at all. BlogFusion comes with four prefabricated designs ready to be used. Design templates can be switched out at any time with just a few clicks of the mouse:




If, however, you are compelled to express yourself through the visual elements of your site, BlogFusion lets you reach right into the HTML and CSS through the advanced site design setup:




The screen shot above has three text areas: Blog Page Template, Photo Page Template, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). As I mentioned before, the HTML control is available but limited. The CSS control, on the other hand, is completely open-ended. The HTML and CSS can be edited for the Blog Portal and for the individual blogs within that portal.


Once you have a portal set up, you can create multiple blogs, each with its own prefab or custom design:




Each blog can use one of the three text editor options. The choice of text editor can be switched at any time:




I opted for the FCK Editor as I found its HTML creation to be a bit more reliable, especially when it came to photo uploads:




In addition to easy blog entry creation, BlogFusion provides setup wizards for each of your sidebar modules:




BlogFusion also allows users to create photo galleries, for which uploading photos was a snap. The screen shot below demonstrates a single photo upload; however, up to 10 photos can be uploaded at the same time:




XML-RPC lets you update your blog using desktop editors such as Ecto. These applications sync up with your blog, allowing you to use both the web-based administration and the XML-RPC applications:




The Ecto XML-RPC editor allows you all the same rich text options of the FCK Editor with a snappier interface that makes desktop applications so enjoyable. In addition to standard text editing, Ecto also allows you to easily integrate with sites such as Amazon.com, Flickr.com, and YouTube.com:


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.

sohbet's Gravatar ML-RPC lets you update your blog using desktop editors such as Ecto. These applications sync up with your blog, allowing you to use both the web-based administration and the XML-RPC applications: thanks
# Posted By sohbet | 27-Apr-08 04:35 PM
Alleyj Hinckp's Gravatar Thank you for the good writeup. It in fact was a amusement account it. Look advanced to more added agreeable from you! By the way, how could we communicate?
# Posted By Alleyj Hinckp | 18-May-12 02:31 PM
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