Benjawi.

The first version of my Price Tapestry blog is now up and part of my portfolio. It's still in it's early stages and I already have a small list of improvements and add ons to make, hence giving it a version. All future updates will be free of charge to anyone who has purchased a version of this software so as I improve the software you can easily update and enjoy the improvements if you wish.

With Price Tapestry now being able to be intergrated with WordPress, it got me thinking all people want is a blog system. So why not create one that works with Price Tapestry instead of having to intergrate the framework into another CMS.

The main part of this is the blog system. I've created an additional part of the Price Tapestry CMS where you can initially view the list of blogs that you have created. From here you can add a new entry, edit an existing one or delete one. The text input is aided by TinyMCE which allows you to add textual features such as styles like bold and italic as well as tables, bullet points and images. It adds in all the html that you need like the paragraph and header tags. One option was to ignore this completely and use php to read paragraphs from a database entry and adding <br/> tags where this happens. The problem with that is that you end up with effectively one giant paragraph and it's not as easy for users to style. TinyMCE was easy to implement into the blog and really enhances the user experience.

There are two forms that you can use of this. One is the standard blog where you go to the blog page and can view all recent blogs. A perfect example of this can be found on the Buy Household Appliances blog. The other is widget form where you add a small amount of code to a page and you get something similar to what's on the home page of the Household Appliances site. Obviously you just need to style this to suit your sites needs. To aid with this I've kept it very simple. There aren't many ID's or Classes for you to play around with to easily get a stylish looking widget or blog page.

There are also two versions of the admin section that come with this. The first is the standard, and as only one part has changed all you need to do is update the admin menu file which is supplied along with adding in the admin blog files. The second version is a styled one where you have the main links at the top and additional ones in the footer while adding some colour and a more gentle feel than the standard harsh but plain white.

I already have ideas of what future updates will be added as well other features that can be included. The first one I'm working on is an archive system which I imagine won't take too long. The reason it's not in the initial release is because at the moment there's not need for it, but as you add more posts to the blog there will be, which is why it's the first improvement on my short list. Another one is the ability to add individual enteries to certain pages, such as product pages or for each category on your site.

If you're interested, check out the images below and visit the portfolio page to find out how to get your hands on it.