Running your own website as a freelancer often is a neglected task - so much effort for the handful of visitors! Now imagine you would also develop a CMS and a blog application along the way.
The Neos-based blog plugin I'm running my website with, got a few more updates. During the last three months I have tried to continuously work on it in order to achieve two goals: figure out missing features and oddities in Neos and in the end have a blogging social media tool the way I always wanted it - tightly integrated into my favorite content management system to be.
During the last few days I took a few more hurdles which now allows me to provide an RSS feed again. This is neatly integrated into Neos and is activated by just two lines of TypoScript. I'm burning to give you a demo as soon as I find time to record a little screencast. Since the future of Feedburner Adsense for Feeds is unclear, I'm giving uri.lv a shot. Any other service I might want to try?
Another "detail" I decided to change is the node structure for blog posts. As one result the URIs are now shallow which means that all blog posts now reside under robertlemke.com/en/blog/. When I thought I was done with this, I ended up spending another night to teach my Chef-powered server to accept custom rewrite rules ;-)
Finally, pagination for the blog post overview has been a long term issue on my task list. In order to paginate blog posts, which are actually TYPO3CR nodes, I needed to create a new widget for TYPO3CR and make it behave properly if it reached the bottom end of pages. And while I was at it, I hastily integrated some endless scrolling, too.
So far I have spent more than 90 hours this year working (unpaid) on the implementation of this blog plugin and the related features and fixes in Neos and Flow. But well, if the result is a blog / news / article system based on a slick CMS and framework, I might make many current Wordpress users happy one day ;-)
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