We have a youth & childrens adviser in our diocese who has started a blog using www.blogger.com and we would like to be able to integate blogs of this type within our diocesan website. Included in the blog are various multimedia resources, includign photos, swf files, links to YouTube etc. Is there a way of easily integrating these types of content in the Discussion Forum used as a blog?

The present blog can be found here: http://dopcandy.blogspot.com/

The only alternative I have found so far is to use an IFrame extension to include the blogger site, but this has the significant downside of also allowing links to other blogs over which we have no control, within our diocesan website.

Any ideas?

Many thanks,

Sandy Matheson

Is anyone there?

I notice from one of the last topics in this forum that questions were asked about allowing html code in a blog, has the extension been changed to allow that yet?

Hi Sandy,

I did post a response last week, but it seems it did not get actually posted so I will try to recall what I said:

You definitely can add multimedia resources and using the latest wec_discussion helps a lot in that area. Go under the Spam tab on the Flexform of the plugin on your page. You can allow all HTML tags, and if it is a blog where only certain logged in users can post, this should work fine. You can also set the number of links allowed too. I was able to post YouTube videos and images from Flickr on my sample wec_discussion blog.

Remember to not post images or multimedia that you do not have copyright to post (YouTube, Flickr, etc. want you to post...but other sites might not).

The only thing about Blogger, Wordpress, etc. is that on some of these sites, you can have a way to automatically post to your own Blog with a button. With the wec_discussion, you have to add the links manually (copy the link and then post it). If you see some cool feature for Blogger, etc. that you think would be worthwhile, let us know and we can look into what it would be to incorporate it.

-Dave

Dave,

Many thanks for your reply. I was using an older version (in fact I have only just learnt that you must update the list of available extensions before installing any otherwise you may only be able to install an outdated version - as I did!).

I have set it up to allow HTML tags (HTML Tags Allowed =1). Is it possible to set this only for original posts and not for comments? This would allow an authorised user who creates the blog to include multimedia in it, but protect the blog from rogue code entered as a comment.

I tested this first with a simple html tag and it worked fine.

I then edited the blog post to access a YouTube video and the FE continued to show the bold OK but then displayed the raw html code for the YouTube link and not the video.

I then went into the BE and started an entirely new blog post and just pasted in the YouTube code and it displayed correctly.

Any ideas why it might display correctly on one occasion and not on another?

Many thanks,

Sandy

Is it possible to enable HTML tags for posts, but not for comments in a blog?

Many thanks,

Sandy

Yeah, I can see the need for that. I will put it on the to-do list. Comments and main entries need to be handled separately at times. Comments are where most spam come in and they need more control.

I hope to be updating the wec_discussion in the next two weeks and will find a good solution for this.

As for why the YouTube URL worked one time and did not, my only guess is that it was a cache issue. If you find it reproducable though, let me know the sequence of events.

-Dave

Thaks Dave. I look forward to the new version.

Sandy