Using the Blog interfaces
From your Intranet/Extranet, a Blog module is offered in your main menu. This normally leads to your collection of Blogs that you might have on different websites linked to your personalized application engine.
The blog editor is integrated as part of our engine with Content-Tools to drive the editing features with a lot of in-house customization.
An overview of the Blog editing interface:
The above image shows what a relatively virgin blog looks like in its details (this Blog as a matter of fact). The Blog ID is only there for cosmetic purposes for the moment, it gives a bit of feedback when creating new blogs upon saving them. The Site Name is the website on which you wish to link the blog, (see here on how to manage your websites). Currently we constrain this to one site at a time (but you could modify this field to reflect a multiple-site selection by right-clicking it and changing it to a checkbox style selection. ;) But only on private database setups, hint-hint!)
The Creation date and Last change (date) are two fields that cannot be modified, they're automatically managed by the engine.
Display start & end dates; this is where things get interesting; this allows one to schedule the availability of a blog online, normally. This feature exists, but is not currently implemented in the visitor interfaces (I think?)
Assigned group (writers) allows you to share the editing of this Blog/Article with others of that particular group. Be careful as this normally also grants them Delete rights (you can also disable that in the db-table administrative interfaces).
The Author is whoever created the Blog first, although its not fixed, the author can be changed later by default. Careful though, as the Author has full-privileges (edit and delete) on the Blog/article as well (by assigning it to someone else you could effectively remove yourself from the editor equation).
Cover image is seldom used, because its a wee-bit problematic on the end layouts. But if you're into fitting puzzle pieces, for now, it works. Suggestions would be to keep this image thumbnail-sized since usually your visitors will be seeing it in index or category pages.
The Slideshow path allows the editor to configure a Folder containing many images, and they'll be presented as a slideshow when viewing the Blog itself. This should remain relatively customisable by loading a preferred rendering template on the visitor site.
On the right side of this interface, you'll notice another content-menu (with a purple button) which allows you to toggle between this detail screen and the actual content, separated by their linguistic categories. If you extend the underlying table (in a private setting), then you can also extend the linguistic panels by creating fields appropriately suffixed with the _ex ISO 2 chars language code. (the languages must be defined as supported languages in your app-environment though.)
In the above picture, you will note the blue feathers over HTML content fields, by clicking the feather you'll activate the writing interface with its menu overlay as shown on the bottom-right (this menu overlay can popup randomly, left or right sides).
Top-right side you'll notice different sections, depending on your supported languages (for that particular website), each language will be offered for editing, along with the Blog's details (those that are not language specific).
Finally, at the bottom, the Save button (which is also at the top-right, as in all interfaces in this engine).
The editor menu;
I think most people will find that menu self-explanatory. Items of note is the insertion of tables (which might not be what everyone expects, you can specify the number of columns, and the rows will auto-adjust on a carriage-return in the last column, last row to append new rows.)
The image insertion is integrated with our internal FileManager with its own upload facilities. Typically, uploaded content (not limited to images) will be stored under the webroot as website_name/CMS/Blog/BlogID-Hash/filename.ext, you don't have to fiddle with the URIs or paths, the engine handles it all for you. (Also, take note that this "Article editing" interface is also available for much more than Blogs, and acts the same way; we map the Tablename/ObjectID-Hash/ to store any uploaded files or images.
Insertion of videos is done using (remote) URIs normally, this feature hasn't been perfected yet.
Also missing (sorry!) is some image manipulation, normally you can resize images by hand, but we haven't programmed the hooks to save these image modifications yet.