Blog Templates Not Quite Right Yet

The recent addition of separate templates for blog posts in list and detail views is a small but useful improvement. At last we have a way to distinguish the context in which a blog post is being presented.

Prior to this change, exactly the same overall page template, overall blog template and individual blog post template were applied in both the list and detail views. This meant it was impossible to customise the appearance of blog posts in either context. If you wanted to have a social networking widgets appended to each post when viewing the detail of an individual post, then you had to have the same widgets visible on the page listing all posts. There was simply no way of detecting the different context (amazing but true).

Now at least there is some respite. We now have separate blog post templates for list and detail views. So you can, via contextual CSS, change the appearance of a blog post in list and detail views, including adding of such things as social networking widgets.

When this was announced, I thought “Great, now all those problems with blog presentation will be solved”. Not so. Because the system still limits you to using the same overall page template and the same overall blog template in list and detail views. The overall blog template is a wrapper that goes around the entire page content in either list or detail views.

Consider this problem: You want to include an introductory explanation about your blog on the list view (i.e. the “home page” of the blog), but you don’t want that introduction to appear on the detail view for individual posts.

Under the current system this can’t be done, because content which should appear once at the top of a page must occur in the overall blog template or the overall page template, and these are the same in both list and detail views. Another BC brick wall. In the ended I resorted to some JQuery to hide these introductory elements on the detailed post view. But that should not be necessary.

What’s needed?

Separate overall blog templates for list and detailed views. Surely this should not be difficult to add? How about it BC?

Some Explanations At Last

Well, today we at last have an admission from Business Catalyst that progress has been slow, together with an explanation of why. To quote the BC blog post:

1. We’ve had to invest a large amount of effort into system stability and reliability, e.g. we’ve already launched new data centers in New Jersey, USA and Dublin, Ireland, which of course were prioritized over wishlist requests.
2. We acquired a new engineering team to work on the platform shortly after the acquisition. While we had high hopes in the beginning that we could be releasing new features immediately, the reality is that it’s taken the team a significant amount of time to familiarize themselves with BC’s codebase and architecture. It’s only now and moving forward into the future that we’ll start reaping the benefits of this investment the engineers have made in understanding BC.
3. As a consequence of switching engineering teams, we underestimated how difficult it was to implement some of your customer requests and so we over-promised in the beginning.
4. Moving forward we need to put a greater emphasis on quality and testing to make sure that new features and bugfixes are stable which means we will be sacrificing some speed in delivering features

Of course it is not surprising that a new engineering team will take time to get up to speed with an existing system. In fact it is inevitable. And that’s what’s surprising — that BC management (and especially Adobe management) didn’t see this coming. It suggests a lack of experience and wisdom in the organisation.

This admission is not encouraging, because as is explained further down in the BC blog post, very little progress has been made with the wishlist. Goodness knows how long the wishlist must be by now! The design limitations of BC are disappointing to say the least and BC users, many of whom are smart, clever people, have discovered the myriad problems with the system and documented these in the wishlist. I’ve added some myself, and they’re not just cosmetic issues, but significant deficiencies in design and function. Looks like we will be waiting some time yet to see our wishes granted.