One of my biggest obsessions of late is the state of community & collaboration Products for Plone.  (See my baseline rant of a few weeks ago.)  One of the topics I went on about at some length there (and on the Plone-devels mailing list) was the somewhat sorry state of blogging products for Plone. To make a long story short, there are about five halfway decent blogging products for Plone, but none that are truly outstanding and full-featured.  Seems suboptimal to me.

Since I wrote that initial piece, the landscape of blogging tools has continued to shift -- in promising ways.  Kai Diefenbach, the creator of EasyBlog, released a 1.0 version and announced his intention to refactor EasyBlog and use the fast-evolving modular services of the Quills 1.0 branch, on which Tim Hicks has been quietly doing some great work.  That's a great move towards a more collaborative product landscape, and hopefully the combined forces of two leading Plone blogging development efforts will result in an accelerated development effort.  Bravo to Tim and Kai for making the connection.

Then, early last week, another interesting development: Atsushi Shibata released COREBlog2, which is the first Plone-compatible version of COREBlog, the leading blogging product for Zope.  COREBlog2 has a very polished front-end with most of what you'd expect in a blogging product.  It also looks like it's being developed a Z3/Five-ish style.

COREBlog2 looks like a nice product, but it's still a few syllables short of being the Last Word in Plone blogging products.  Here's a quick rundown:

Good things about COREBlog2

• A sensible, fully-fleshed-out blog entry schema.  Headline, subheader, excerpt, body text, extended text, categories, etc.
  
• Sends pings to notification services.
• Trackbacks and comments can be open, closed or hidden. 
  
• Nice, clean default templates.
  
• Support for comments from non-logged-in users.

These are all things that are missing (or mostly missing) from current Plone blogging tools.

What COREBlog2 seems to be lacking:

• Tools to prevent (and quickly clean up) comment and trackback spamming.  Plone isn't being targeted right now, but it will as more folks use it to blog.  Best to solve the problem while it's not an urgent one.  WordPress' option to moderate unauthenicated commenters comments until the admin approves, then to automatically publish comments from folks whose previous comments have been approved works pretty well.
  
• COREBlog2 needs to have an option to require users to register/login to post.  That's appropriate for some sites. 
  

I'm not technical enough to offer an opinion on the quality of the underlying code, but I'd love to see some comments on it if anyone out there is so inclined. (Hint hint.)

OK, So where does this leave us?

Where to from here?  How do we get a great blogging product out into the wild?  It seems to me like COREBlog2 provides a solid front-end (and maybe a solid back-end, too).  No idea where Atsushi wants to take it or if he's looking for contributions/collaborators.  (There doesn't even seem to be public SVN yet, but the code is GPL, so that's a good sign.)  Tim Hicks' work on FatSyndication, FatTrackback, etc. -- Five-ified core services that blogs (and other content types!) need is also very worthy, and Limi has explicitly stated that he thinks its a smart direction to pursure.  Kai clearly has a head of steam up on the problem, and is looking to pitch in collaboratively. 

Personally, I think it would make a lot of sense to try to wire together Tim's back-end work with COREBlog's polished front end, and try to fill in the missing features around comment and trackback abuse. 

What do you think?