Blog

This Meteor package gives you a basic, out-of-the-box blog at /blog. We wanted a way to add a blog to an existing app without running another dyno or server for a meteor-based blog.

Example instance: http://differential.com/blog

This blog is very much a work in progress. To help decide what gets add next, vote with your Github issues!

Features

• Medium-style editor
• Slug-based URLs (editable)
• Add images (store in database or upload to S3)
• Support DISQUS comments
• Blog post tags and tag view
• Widget to embed recent posts on another (e.g. home) page
• Customizable templates
• SEO best practices (OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, share buttons, Google+ author attribution)
• Autosave
• Pagination
• Code syntax highlighting
• Multiple roles (admin/author)
• RSS feed

Roadmap

• Check out the enhancements tracker

Quick Start

$ meteor add ryw:blog

You will get routes for:

/blog
/admin/blog

/admin/blog requires that Meteor.user() return a user.

Usage

Roles

By default, any logged-in user can administer the blog. To ensure that only select users can edit the blog, the package supports two roles:

• adminRole - Can create, and modify or delete any post.
• authorRole - Can create, and modify or delete only my own posts.

To enable either or both roles, specify values in the blog config:

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isServer
  Blog.config
    adminRole: 'blogAdmin'
    authorRole: 'blogAuthor'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isServer) {
  Blog.config({
    adminRole: 'blogAdmin',
    authorRole: 'blogAuthor'
  });
}

Then, you need to give blog users that role. Currently, you're on your own to add these roles somehow:

• Add these directly to admin users in the database ("roles": ["blogAdmin"]), or
• Roll your own admin page using the methods provided by meteor-roles, or
• Use an accounts admin package like accounts-admin-ui-bootstrap-3.

Comments

DISQUS

This package supports DISQUS comments. Configure your DISQUS short name in the client and comments will render below all your blog posts. If you use your own blogShowTemplate template, include {{> disqus this}} to display comments.

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    comments:
      disqusShortname: 'myshortname'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    comments: {
      disqusShortname: 'myshortname'
    }
  });
}

SideComments.js

This package has experimental integration with SideComments.js. Enable side comments in your blog settings. Currently, side comments uses the Meteor accounts for your Meteor site as comment users, which is probably not what you want. You can also allow anonymous comments, which lets anyone type in anything without even a name. Also, probably not what you want.

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    comments:
      useSideComments: true # default is false
      allowAnonymous: true # default is false

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    comments: {
      useSideComments: true,
      allowAnonymous: true
    }
  });
}

Bootstrap Templates

Meteor blog works out-of-the-box with minimal, decent-looking Bootstrap templates. If you use these default templates, you must add the meteor bootstrap-3 package.

$ meteor add mrt:bootstrap-3

Custom Templates

While the admin templates are opinionated, the front-end is bare markup, ready to by styled. If the default templates aren't doing it for you, you can override the default templates with your own by setting configuration variables:

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    blogIndexTemplate: 'myBlogIndexTemplate' # '/blog' route
    blogShowTemplate: 'myShowBlogTemplate'   # '/blog/:slug' route

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    blogIndexTemplate: 'myBlogIndexTemplate',
    blogShowTemplate: 'myShowBlogTemplate'
  });
}

In your templates, you can use these Handlebars helpers provided by the package to display blog posts with some basic, semantic markup:

• {{> blogIndex}} - Renders list of blog posts (/blog route)
• {{> blogShow}} - Renders single blog post (/blog/:slug route)

Example:

<template name="myBlogIndexTemplate">
  <h1>Welcome to my Blog</h1>
  <div>{{> blogIndex}}</div>
</template>

If you don't want any of our markup, use the blog data provided in the template context directly:

• posts - Collection of minimongoid blog post objects (/blog route)
• this - minimongoid blog post object (/blog/:slug route)

Example:

<template name="myBlogIndexTemplate">
  <h1>Welcome to my Blog</h1>
  <ul>
    {{#each posts}}
      <li>
        <h2>{{title}}</h2>
        <p>Published on {{publishedAt}}</p>
        <p>Excerpt: {{excerpt}}</p>
      </li>
    {{/each}}
  </ul>
</template>

Custom NotFound

You can provide a custom notFoundTemplate to use when a blog post slug is not found.

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    blogNotFoundTemplate: 'myNotFoundTemplate'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    blogNotFoundTemplate: 'myNotFoundTemplate'
  });
}

Blog Post Excerpt

By default, blog summaries or excerpts are generated by taking the 1st paragraph from the blog post. You can override this function by configuring a custom excerptFunction. For example, if you wanted to create an excerpt from the 1st sentence:

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    excerptFunction: (body) ->
      body.split('.')[0] + '.'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    excerptFunction: function(body) {
      return body.split('.')[0] + '.';
    }
  });
}

Images

Adding images to your blog posts works out of the box and saves the images to gridFS in your Mongo database. You can optionally have these images to an Amazon S3 bucket that you configure.

To setup S3 for file storage, add the following in /settings.json (or any other location of your choice).

{
  "public": {
    "blog": {
      "useS3": true
    }
  },
  "private": {
    "blog": {
      "s3Config": {
        "bucket": "you-bucket-name",
        "ACL": "public-read",
        "MaxTries": 2,
        "accessKeyId": "XXXXXXXXXXXXX",
        "secretAccessKey": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

Pagination

By default, blog posts are paged in 20 at a time. You can modify this value in settings. Set to null to turn off paging entirely.

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    pageSize: 10

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    pageSize: 10
  });
}

The default blogIndexTemplate template displays a Load More button. If you use your own template, include the {{blogPager}} helper to display the button.

Code Highlighting

If you fancy a coding blog, the blog package supports syntax highlighting using highlight.js. If enabled, any content within <pre> tags will get modified for syntax highlighting. You can specify any highlight.js style file. Example config:

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isClient
  Blog.config
    syntaxHighlighting: true # default is false
    syntaxHighlightingTheme: 'atelier-dune.dark' # default is 'github'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isClient) {
  Blog.config({
    syntaxHighlighting: true,
    syntaxHighlightingTheme: 'atelier-dune.dark'
  });
}

Social Sharing

This package depends on the shareit package for powering social sharing. If you use your own blogShowTemplate template, include {{> shareit}} to display share buttons.

Recent Posts Helper

You can include a basic snippet of HTML displaying recent blog posts (e.g. on your home page). Insert the inclusion helper where you want the recent posts to appear.

{{> blogLatest}}

Or you can specify the # of posts to show:

{{> blogLatest num=5}}

There are classes in the template for styling.

RSS

An RSS feed is automatically generated at /rss/posts. To set the title and description in the feed, configure RSS:

# CoffeeScript
if Meteor.isServer
  Blog.config
    rss:
      title: 'My blog title'
      description: 'My blog description'

// JavaScript
if (Meteor.isServer) {
  Blog.config({
    rss: {
      title: 'My blog title',
      description: 'My blog description'
    }
  });
}

Add a head tag somewhere in your .html files so your RSS feed can be discovered:

<head>
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My blog title" href="/rss/posts">
</head>