BlogIt is an open source blog engine alternative to Blogger and Wordpress and is built on Symfony2 and Bootstrap.
#Requirements
- PHP 5.3 or later
- Symfony2
- MySQL / PostgreSQL
#Features
- Multilingual UI, currently English and Finnish
- Support for multiple users
- Administration of categories and posts
- WYSIWYG editor
- Many nice Bootstrap3 themes out-of-the-box
- Facebook comments plugin
- Facebook like button
I have published my own blog about reading at www.kirjablogi.com and you are more than welcome to have a look around. Unfortunately this blog is only in finnish as the main target are finnish book readers.
#Installation
To install BlogIt to your server, go to desired folder of installation and clone the project from Github:
$ git clone [email protected]:artur-gajewski/blogit.git
If you want to contribute to the project, please fork it into your Github account and then clone it into your development environment.
$ git clone [email protected]:YOUR_GIT_ACCOUNT_NAME/blogit.git
Now go to your newly created directory.
Copy the distribution file for the parameters to your local file:
$ cp app/config/parameters.yml-dist app/config/parameters.yml
Modify the parameters.yml to reflect your database connections and blog settings of your preference.
Create the following directories inside app folder:
- cache
- logs
Prepare cache, logs folder permissions by running (double check your apache user on the first one):
$ sudo chmod -Rf +a "daemon allow delete,write,append,file_inherit,directory_inherit" app/cache app/logs
$ sudo chmod -Rf +a "`whoami` allow delete,write,append,file_inherit,directory_inherit" app/cache app/logs
If you don't have Composer yet, download it following the instructions on http://getcomposer.org/ or just run the following command:
$ curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
Then, use the install command to install all dependencies:
$ php composer.phar install
After all dependencies are installed, make sure your app/cache and app/logs folder have write access. If there is no write access, the web server might output an internal error.
Connect to your database and run these commands:
CREATE USER 'blogit'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'blogit'@'localhost';
then run the following commands:
$ app/console doctrine:database:create
Next, you will have to create the database schema for the BlogIt:
$ app/console doctrine:schema:create
If you are developing BlogIt, you can update your schema with:
$ app/console doctrine:migrations:migrate
When you make changes to any of the entities, make sure to create migration file:
$ app/console doctrine:migrations:diff
Make sure you remember to commit the new migration file as well!
#Vagrant
If you want to get development environment setup fast, you can use Vagrant to setup development environment for BlogIt virtually. All you have to do is run Vagrant as follows:
$ vagrant up
#Themes
BlogIt comes bundles with numerous Bootsrap 3 themes. In order to change the themes, modify the blog_theme variable in parameters.yml configuration file taht reflect the folder name present in web/bundles/blogmain/themes folder.
Each theme has its own CSS folder that contains the bootstrap.css file that builds the complete layout and theme.css which are meant to override certain components in the bootstrap.css definitions.
Themes are kindly provided by Thomas Park and his wonderful project at www.bootswatch.com
#AddSearch implementation
This blog features, along it's own native search function, a possibility to use AddSearch's technology to index the whole blog and to use their plugin to generate very nice content search based on a search word.
In order to replace the blog's own search function with AddSearch plugin, you must obtain a site specific key from www.addsearch.com and insert it into the addsearch_key variable in parameters.yml file.
#Assets
BlogIt uses asset management and thus, you must install the assets.
$ app/console assets:install
#Creating admin users
In order to be able to administrate your new blog, you must create a user:
$ php app/console blog:user:create
Enter required information and after the console is done creating your user you are ready to login.
#Parameters
There are many things you can customize in BlogIt in the parameters.yml file:
blog_theme: Theme of the blog.
blog_title: Title of the blog which will be visible in the navigation bar and browser's bar.
blog_hero: Hero unit's big text.
blog_subhero: Smaller head text under the hero unit.
blog_copyright: Your copyright name.
blog_email: email address you want to display to your readers.
facebook_like_button: Whether you want to enable Facebook button after each post.
facebook_commenting: Whether you want to enable Facebook comment plugin so that people can comment on your posts.
#RESTful API
If you want to implement blog writings to any third party website, it is very simple to do so by using BlogIt's RESTful API.
Fetch list of posts from newest to oldest: /api/v1/posts
Fetch list of posts in chronological order: /api/v1/posts/ordered
Fetch individual post: /api/v1/posts/{postId}
Fetch list of categories: /api/v1/categories
Fetch posts in individual category: /api/v1/categories/{categoryId}
You can test out the API on my personal blog and fetch posts with www.kirjablogi.com/api/v1/posts
#If you use BlogIt
If you end up installing your own instance of BlogIt, I kindly ask you to send me a quick note about it. I would love to see this blog engine in action some where in the world :)
#Contributing
We welcome any developers with various skills and background. Anyone is free to join the team and develop BlogIt.
If you want to join the team, please contact me and provide me with your github account ID so that I can add you to the team.
#Welcome
Enjoy and welcome to the project!
Artur Gajewski
Skype: artur.t.gajewski