Blog with part private and part public content - how?

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11/8/2011 11:25:05 AM
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Blog with part private and part public content - how?

I'd like to create a company knowledge base in mojoPortal, where some content is secured to registered users, and some is public.  I've started using a blog for this, with categories to keep things somewhat organized, in preference to a hierarchical page structure.

I was thinking I could use a feed with selective publishing to achieve the part-public and part private access, but this doesn't seem to work. The end user can get from the feed to the post, which then means they can see the other categories etc. Or I could block access to the full post, and show only the feed

It is now seeming that this is not possible using the out-of-the box functionality. I'm thinking I'll need a second blog that is public, and to copy posts into the public version, but this is not ideal. Have I missed something?

I realize I could achieve this differential security with a hierarchical page structure, but that is relatively laborious for users, and the breadth of the subject matter is huge.

Any better ideas for a knowledge base? (it's OK I won't mention the "w" word).

11/8/2011 11:41:35 AM
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Re: Blog with part private and part public content - how?

You're right about the security issues with the blog. Basically the blog needs to be either fully open, or fully secured.

Have you already considered the idea of putting each knowledge base entry on its own page? That would give you ultimate flexibility since each page can be secured individually, and the menu/child page links would provide a nice organizational structure. You could even group similar topics within a page, and secure them at the module level. This structure would also be searchable and obey security settings if you're using the built-in search.

Other than that, I'd think the best solution would be a custom feature, but that would require quite a bit of work.

11/8/2011 1:04:51 PM
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Re: Blog with part private and part public content - how?

I have considered that, but these factors weighed against...

  1. We want to be able to author the articles in something a little quicker and nicer than the Tiny MCE or CKEditor interfaces, particular for including images into the text.  With a blog we can author in Windows Live Writer, or (and I didn't know this until yesterday) Word. Images are looked after automatically.   I'm thinking we cannot author non-blog pages using these with mojoPortal (?correct?).  I can author pages on a WordPress site using WLW but not sure how to do this in mojo, if at all.
  2. Our subject matter for the knowledge base is very broad, and I feel we would tie ourselves in knots trying to structure pages/menus. Not a strong point this, I know, and of course pages and content could be shifted around through time. But this is all much more work for user than firing a post to a blog and choosing categories.
  3. A blog has a natural timeline, which helps filter the relevant from the less relevant in a knowledge base, simply by how old a post is. There's no equivalent with non-blog pages, something I find a problem with the mojoPortal docs too - there's no page metadata saying when it was last edited, which is helpful when judging the usefulness of the content. In fact this is turning into a feature request - an option on the HTML module to display last edit user + date/time.

Ideas very welcome!

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