Blog Powered by TYPO3 Neos

by Robert Lemke on January 14th, 2013

During the past few weeks I have been working more or less silently on a proof of concept for a natively Neos-powered blog. This is an important milestone, as it is supposed to prove the concept of our node-based content repository and the powerful rendering mechanism of TypoScript 2 and Fluid.

Today I finally deployed the new blog and migrated all posts from the previous standalone Flow application. The goal of this exercise is not just a plain blog example, but, in the end, a full-featured blog application with a great user experience. I think that the combination of Neos' content editing concepts and the power of the Flow framework underneath will let quite a few people consider again if their current blog solution is easy and powerful enough for running their website.

Seamless Editing

But back to present. The nicest feature of my blog prototype is the seamless integration into Neos. Blog posts are just page-like nodes which are rendered by Neos like any other content. Even comments of a blog posts are just "regular" content which can be reviewed and edited in the Neos user interface. I can edit blog posts in my personal workspace and preview them right on my version of the website before publishing them.

Finally I can insert images anywhere I like and provide code examples inline!

As I wrote, this is currently a solution working for my site and meant as a proof-of-concept. Much more thinking and development needs to go into a full-featured blog plugin. However, once the work is done, the solution can be easily used as a news system, magazine solution or solve other tasks which need to deal with article-like content.

Next Steps

As of today it's not clear yet to which degree the TYPO3 Association will fund the development of Neos and Flow (but we're expecting a statement by the Expert Advisory Board soonish). So by now I've been working off my piggy bank to create this prototype and implement the missing features in Neos.

I know that many of you can't wait to start your website with a powerful news or blog system based on Neos. If you're one of them, please consider sponsoring your pet feature and some clean up of the current code base. If I find the time, I'll gladly write some more posts about the technical details of my blog.

So, what are your thoughts on a Neos powered blog? Which approach or feature would you like to see implemented?

Comments

Robert Lemke | 14.01.2013

Well, it seems like my create-new-blog-post-method still had a bug because it missed creating a "comment" Section sub node. Or put differently: until a minute ago you couldn't leave a reply. Sorry for that.

Olivier Dobberkau | 14.01.2013

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your blogpost.

I wonder if you could explain the mechanics of the content repository and share a view into your typoscript to define the blog-objects.

best would be if you could share the code somewhere (without the need of support :-))

Thanks, Olivier

Robert Lemke | 14.01.2013

Hi Olivier –

I'll collect some screen shots and code snippets and write a more detailled blog post, hopefully later this week.

Cheers, Robert

Bastian Waidelich | 14.01.2013

Slick! And you imported all posts from your previous blog!?

Oliver Eglseder | 14.01.2013

Congratulations!
You wrote that comments can be edited? I think that's not quite the right thing. Comments should not be editable, so nobody can rag with them.
I know that Neos provides the ability to edit every kind of content on the page, so protecting comments would be a feature.
Would it be possible to view a catalog of individual defined Tags, which are ordered by frequently usage in Neos, which can be assigned to posts by drag and drop ? And a panel for visitors, to search for posts by tags, too.
That would be great stuff!!
Keep the good work going.
Greetings, Oliver

merzilla | 14.01.2013

Hey Robert,
that sounds great! Thumbs up! :)

Cheers
Ralf

Julian Kleinhans | 14.01.2013

Hi Robert,

congratulations!
This is a very nice blog. Is it possible that you share this blog package with us, for example on github ?

And i have noticed that the title tag is missing ;) *SEOfail

Cheers
Julian

Robert Lemke | 14.01.2013

@Julian: yes, many SEO and semantic fails still - but "real artists ship" ;-)

I will of course share the code on Github and Packagist - as soon as I got the chance to improve it a little more.

Soren Malling | 14.01.2013

Cool!

This really shows what the purpose of the content repository is! Really looking forward to see your code. I've been working on a kind of "View" package, but could only use Text node. This blog post really shows that the package has something to it!

Robert Lemke | 15.01.2013

@Oliver: yes, tagging support is definitely on my list. I think I'll share my whole wish list and some additional thoughts in a future post.

mario | 18.01.2013

Very very good news,
I am very anxious to use it too.
And I am quite sure your code is already clean and ready to be shown to the world :-)
Let us play with it!
best wishes
mario

mario | 18.01.2013

hi
I see my own comment. Nice for me, but not feasible in the real world.
Have you implemented a way to moderate comments?
thks
mario

Thomas | 21.01.2013

Hey Robert,

We might add some features and give the code back to you.

Would be great if you could share your code like any other "extension" so that we can contribute...

Greets, Thomas

Robert Lindh | 07.02.2013