Note: I'm no longer supporting this plugin. I think the WP Discourse WordPress plugin is a better alternative for combining styled posts with a Discourse forum. If anyone would like to take over maintaining the Discourse Blog Post plugin, that would be great.
This plugin is for adding 'blog post' styles to the first post in a Discourse topic. If the post contains images, it places the first image
in a full width header above the topic. It adds the css class blog-post to the topic's body tag, and the class blog-post-content to
the cooked content of the post.
The ability to create blog-posts on a forum is controlled by group membership. By default, only members
of the admins and moderators groups are allowed to create blog-posts. To allow all users, trust level
1 and up, to be able to create blog posts, add the group 'trust_level_1' to the 'blog post allowed groups' setting.
Blog posts must be enabled for a category before they can be created. This is done on the plugin's settings page. Enter the category names of the categories you want to use into the 'blog post allowed categories' setting. If a category is removed from the allowed categories list, blog posts that have already been created will remain. They can be converted to regular posts either by their creator or by a site admin.
To create a blog-post in an enabled category, open the hidden ('...') post menu buttons underneath the first post in a topic and click on the 'book' icon. That will convert the post into a blog-post and turn the 'book' icon yellow. To convert a blog-post back into a regular post, click the 'book' icon again.
After first creating a blog-post, you will need to either revisit or refresh the page for the header image to
be hidden from the post content. Only the post creator will see the unhidden image. It's hidden from the post
by adding the css class blog-post-image when the post content is rendered.
The plugin adds some basic css rules for styling blog-posts. It allows you to use <span class="large-letter"></span> for
creating large leading letters for paragraphs.
To add further styling to blog posts on a forum, add styles to the blog-post class, for general page styles,
or to the blog-post-content class for styling the content of the posts. For example, this will increase the font
size to 20px and set the max-height of the header image to 440px.
.blog-post-content {
font-size: 20px;
}
.blog-post .blog-post-header-container {
max-height: 440px;
}
The plugin's default styles can be disabled by deselecting the 'blog post use default styles' checkbox on the settings page. This could also be useful if you only wish to use the plugin's header-image function.
Follow the Install a Plugin howto, using
git clone https://github.com/scossar/discourse-blog-post as the plugin command.
Once you've installed it, go to the plugin settings page to enable the plugin and configure which groups should be allowed to create blog posts and which categories they should be allowed to create them in.
If you have any problems with this plugin, feel free to create an issue here. Any improvements to the plugin's css would be greatly appreciated. Pull requests are welcome.