kentico_jurajo wrote: BlogFunctions are specified here: \App_Code\CMSModules\Blogs\BlogFunctions.cs (just a simple search in Visual studio or using Object browser in Visual studio is very good way to see where are things defined).

I really do not know what the issue is - could you please describe it is details?

I had done a search in Visual Studio and it didn't return the declaration that I saw (though it may have been buried within all of the calls to it, but it's also sometimes hard telling if a function's going to be available in the code available, or if it's buried in the .dlls), hence why I asked for more information on BlogFunctions (that said, it seems like a pretty powerful set of functions that can be used in transformations and elsewhere, why do these not have proper documentation?). Thank you for finally pointing me to it.

As for what the issues are:

1. From what I've been able to gather so far, in order to use any of the blog stuff in ASPX templates, I'm required to register them myself. Is this understanding correct? Or is there something in the built-in/pre-registered stuff (existing in the "cms" tag prefix) that I'm missing?

2. There is no ASPX-specific documentation (and not much documentation at all beyond "drag this control here" and end-user level tasks ("create a new blog post by right-clicking the blog node and selecting new blog post")) for the blogging module, and from what I can tell, from the ASPX side of things, the controls don't really behave as one would expect. For example, there doesn't appear to be paging capability in the any of the post-level repeaters (such as what would be on this page, displaying a summary of the recent posts - http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs.aspx ), and if there is, it's non-standard compared to the standard CMSRepeater and there's no intuitive way to make it page. I've had to resort to using a CMSRepeater so that I could have paging capability, because I couldn't find any way to make the Blog WebPart control do paging.

3. There are, in general, a number of holes in the Kentico documentation, or they are next to impossible to search, when it comes to the blog module. As I've mentioned previously, the documentation says nothing about the BlogFunctions class and what's in it. Given this class is used even in the transformations, this seems like a pretty glaring oversight.

Additionally, there are a good dozen or so "stock" blog-related transformations included in an install of a version of Kentico that includes the Community and Blog sections. There are a number of Blog transformations not only in the "Blog*" document types, but also in "Community - Transformations". Several of them appear to be the same at first, but actually behave quite a bit differently when actually implemented. Why is there no information on these starter transformations? And why are they spread between the "Community - Transformations" and "Blog*" document types? Yes, they can be changed, but if the idea of Kentico is to get a site up and running with relatively little need for customization and "tweaking", it seems to me that there should be some kind of example of the output that these different transformations generate, so that it saves the user time in picking which one they want to start with.

4. Another issue I've run into is the GetBlogCommentsCount. There appears to be a discrepancy between the parameters for it, and the CommentsViewer repeater. CommentsViewer has the option to display only approved, which will not only make it filter out spam, but also comments that weren't explicitly approved. However, GetBlogCommentsCount only checks for spam and doesn't have an option to count only approved. This means that a discrepancy can be created between what the comment count displayed on the "recent posts" page with any transformation that uses BlogFunctions.GetBlogCommentsCount to get the comment count, and the page that actually displays the comment. This, of course, can be a difficult issue to track down (and even more difficult to fix if one wants to use the "SelectOnlyApproved" option of the CommentsViewer control), when there is no documentation to be found.

Comments: Have you added the blog comments web part to the page template?

Which web part includes an "add comment" form? According to the list of files in CMSWebParts/Blogs, there are 4 controls that suggest being for comments - BlogComment, BlogCommentsDataSource, BlogCommentsViewer, and BlogCommentsView. I've yet to find any information on BlogComment and BlogCommentsDataSource, and the attributes that intellisense pull up are of no real help. BlogCommentsViewer appears to be the repeater to display the comments, which I've been able to successfully do.

However, none of these controls have provided any hint at creating a comment form.

How else you want to use the blogs if you won't use the web parts (in portal engine) or use the controls from CMSWebParts folder? If you do not want to use what is built in, you have to create your own logic.

Where did I ever say I didn't want to use the built-in controls? I only ever said that I can't use them via Portal, and that I must use them via ASPX, which, outside of the Blog module, hasn't been that much of an issue (mainly because everything that I've needed until now has been doable with the controls already loaded into the cms tag prefix).

I want to use the built-in controls for these things, I'm trying to work with the CMS (and not against it), but that's exraordinarily difficult when the controls don't provide any information about themselves, and there is zero technical documentation on them.

That's why I'm here asking these questions and attempting to contribute by pointing out issues with either the system itself or the documentation (since we all know it's easy to forget that our users don't have as much, or as in depth, knowledge of the entire system as those of us that have developed a given piece of software, and that we, as developers and people with considerable experience with our own software, tend to unconsciously work around the flaws and issues in our own system).