One of my own personal favorite extensions I install on all of my (blog) sites is ochBlog.
In an online world where content is still king, it is very important to make your content ‘shine’. But even more important, make your authors shine: give them a platform that will add value to their personal branding and they will take care of the content on your site: win-win!
Do more with Joomla Core, but do it better...
Combine that with the power to leverage what Joomla already does very well and the philosophy to prevent a ‘vendor lock-in’ (like e.g. K2 or EasyBlog that redo most of the Joomla functionality and unwillingly lure you into a setup that is hard to 'escape') et voila... Do more with Core but do it better :)
ochBlog is currently in it’s final testing fase of a full / dedicated J4 version that will also work (if the Joomla team will hold up on their end of the deal) on J5. So not an extension that was made to work also on J4, but a full and fast J4 version incorporating all the technical security and speed improvements that J4 offers.
So what functional changes are new in this version:
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ochBlog was already fully customizable via template overrides. In version 3.0 it also comes out of the box with bootstrap5 and uikit (yootheme) layouts build in!
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The powerful articlelist view has been removed: now ochBlog will do it’s magic on Joomla core category blog and featured view as well, adding that valuable author and article information on these pages, making it even more integrated with Core Joomla!
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Some integrations like EasyProfile and cjblog have been removed as these extensions do not have J4 compatible versions: these extensions are either not maintained any more or will not be migrated to J4 making it very difficult for me to build in and maintain support for them.
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You can now control what image to use as intro image on category / featured view: set a priority for intro image, full article image firs text image, custom field image, or do not display an image at all.
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Cleanup and truncate the intro text on category blog / featured views
Click here for a Joomla default category blog view ‘enriched’ with author and article info via ochBlog 3.0: https://onlinecommunityhub.nl/blogs
What hasn’t changed:
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It is still highly configurable giving you a very powerful tool to tune and tweak how blogs and articles look on your / your customer’s sites
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Avatar and profile / about text via Joomla Custom fields, Community Builder, Kunena (version 6.x)
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Notification system for authors when their blog has a reached configured number of views
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Custom fields for avatar / image and followme functionality
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Highly configurable Articles List module
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Author page with rss feed for his / her articles
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Authors overview showing a listing of all your site’s authors
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refactored (simplified) blogmanagement view giving your authors a front-end view to all the blogs they have edit access to
- ... and many more features ...
And the best of all? No vendor lock-in!
When you stop using ochBlog / uninstall it, all your content is still available on your site as ochBlog doesn’t import the articles but is build upon what Joomla already does best: being a full fletched CMS!
OchBlog 3.0 will be released in June 2023 when testing is completed. You can already see it in action on my own site via the this link: https://onlinecommunityhub.nl/blogs
ochBlog 3.0 will be available as part of the ochBlog subscription. Due to the amount of work involved in making this version J4 AND J5 ready the price will increase to € 59,-
You can subscribe now to version 2.0 for the current price of € 49,- and will receive the update to version 3.0 automatically when it is released.
