10.4 Server: Enable the Blojsom Admin Console

Apr 13, '06 05:40:00AM

Contributed by: cheekygeek

OS X Server's Weblog/Podcasting Server (based on Blojsom) is pretty darn cool, but it seems like one should be able to do a lot more from the Admin perspective with one's blog. (For example, deleting a blog category that you previously created). Currently, it appears there is no way to do this -- but there is. It is called the Blojsom Administration Console, and Apple disables it by default, but you can enable it for any blog (on a blog-by-blog basis). Here's how...

To turn on (enable) the Blojsom Administration Console, you just need to uncomment a line in a configuration text file, and then restart Blojsom. First navigate into the proper directory (all of the following is in Terminal):

$ cd /Library/Tomcat/blojsom_root/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/username
Replace username with the user's short username. Then open flavor.properties (as root) with your favorite Terminal editor:
$ sudo vi flavor.properties
Once you have it open, remove the hash mark (#) from the front of this line:
#admin=org/blojsom/plugin/admin/templates/admin.vm, text/html;charset=UTF-8
Save changes to the flavor.properties document, and quit the editor.

Restart Blojsom in one of the following ways:

Now if you go to this URL...
http://www.yourserver.com/weblog/username/?flavor=admin
...you will see the Blojsom Admin Console. You will not need to login if you have previously logged into your Weblog (for example, to Add Item). If you see the login screen, then log in!

Under the CATEGORIES tab you will see "Delete an existing blog category." I found one menu item that generated a Tomcat error, but it looks like there are other useful things that you can do here, such as add other users as authors for a blog, etc. Note that the Blojsom Admin Console would have to be enabled on a blog-by-blog basis.

I asked a Blojsom developer at Apple about any negative aspects to enabling the Administration Console and he replied:
There's no particular reason not to enable the Blojsom admin console, although you'll probably find that some functionality doesn't work. We disabled it by default because we don't want to support it.
It may also be worth noting that OS X Server 10.4.6 upgrades Blojsom to version 2.25.

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