Recent Updates to Blog and Gallery Add-on Apps in Aptuitiv Studio

Over the last few weeks we've pushed out some fairly significant updates to our Blog and Gallery add-on apps. We've improved support for tags and RSS/Atom feeds, added new APIs and have done a lot of "under-the-hood" code rewriting to make things more consistent.

Tag Support

We added support for tags and tag clouds to the Blog add-on app last August and a lot of our customers have since used them in their blogs. However, one thing that we noticed is that sometimes they weren't used in the traditional tag scenarios and needed some of the capabilities that categories have. In response to that we added support for setting publish status/dates for tags and customizing the display attributes (layout, page title, meta description, etc). We also added support for creating custom attributes for tags.

While we did all of that we also did a lot of work with the code that powers the tag support. Those improvements make it a lot easier to add tag support to other add-on apps and to keep tag support consistent between add-on apps.

Because we made it easier to add tag support we also updated the Gallery add-on app to have the same tag support that Blog does.

RSS/Atom Feed Updates

An RSS feed is essential to a blog and we just pushed out a couple of updates that will make them a little more useful and flexible.

Below is the list of updates.

• You can now choose where the description content for each feed entry comes from. Previously it was hard-coded to always come from the post abstract. Now you can choose from the post abstract, the post content or another custom text attribute.
• You can now apply variable modifiers to the variables used to build out each feed entry title.

To update the source of the description content for a feed entry go to Blog -> Settings -> RSS & Atom Feed Settings. Under the "Posts" tab edit the "Posts Feed Entry Description Source" field. If you have any custom attributes that are text fields or textarea fields then they will also show up in the list of available sources.

The feed updates have only been applied to the Blog add-on app so far. We'll be applying those updates to other apps in the future.

New APIs

While we worked on the Blog and Gallery add-on apps we also added a few more API methods to each app.

New Blog APIs

• featuredPostByTag
• postsByCategory
• postsByTag
• recentPostsByTag
• tagFilter

New Gallery APIs

• itemsByCategory
• itemsByTag
• recentItemsByTag
• tagCloud
• tagFilter

API Attributes Blog Gallery Tag Cloud

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