Weblogs are created and maintained through an application we call "CS"; CS stands for "Community Server". CS is a perl-based web publication designed to enable many users to login to a common environment where they can create and update information. CS uses a database system where each component is defined within one or more tables.

CS records are used to hold all sorts of information...everything from actual content to templates and layout components to queries.

Here's the main "home" URL for the oreillynet.com install of CS:

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/editor/home

This installation of CS contains content for oreillynet.com, openp2p.com, ONLamp.com, ONJava.com and all of their related sub-sites (DevCenters). Other sites (XML.com, perl.com) have their own CS installs.

You log into CS with your regular oreillynet.com user id and password. Your account has been added to the editor "community", however, so you have the ability to edit information that regular users do not have.

To edit weblogs, you'll make changes to CS records in the "wlg" table. Weblog records also interact with other tables in CS that hold information about authors, users, subjects, etc.

There is a general help page for weblog authors at http://www.oreillynet.com/general/weblog_help.csp -- though some of the URLs will not work for editing records unless you are a weblog author in addition to being an editor. But this page includes useful information about the fields used in weblog entries.

To use the regular CS interface to list weblogs, use this URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/editor/list/wlg

Click on the title of any weblog entry to review it. Above the list of fields, you'll see several options for making changes to the entry. The only one you really need is "Edit".

You can make any changes needed here -- content editing would be done in the "Description/Blurb" and the "Full Text" fields.

Once a weblog is set to audience="group" and status="final", it will be publicly available on our web site ("live"). The title and blurbs are collected by our RSS feeds and used on the cover of oreillynet.com and on the conference coverage page (http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2001). If you make edits to a title and/or blurb after it was already set to "final", it's probably already been picked up by the RSS feed in its original form. In that case, it's good to let production know so we can update the "buckets" that show this content on our pages (they do not update automatically).

There are two main methods we use for displaying weblogs on our sites. The appearance of weblogs on the cover of oreillynet.com uses both of these methods.

Queries are used to display information from CS when we want an automated display. The "More Weblogs" section shown here uses a query. Since queries are automatically accessing records, we can not reorder items that appear as a query result (in this case, they simply appear in date/time order with the most recent at the top). Queries will automatically pick up changes in the record, so if a weblog title appearing here changes, it will automatically update here as well.

RSS "buckets" are used to display information when we need more control over the choice of which items display and in what order they appear. The weblogs section on the cover of oreillynet.com uses a bucket for the "top weblog". The editorial staff decides which weblog should appear at the top, and production makes the changes necessary to put it there ("updating the bucket"). Because a bucket pulls information from our RSS news feed, and not CS, changes are not automatically updated. Notify production if you need us to make a change "live" on the site.

Note on the conference page: The OSCON conference page is done completely through RSS buckets. Any addition of new weblogs to the OSCON coverage page, or any changes to existing blurbs appearing there, need to be made manually. Just let Terrie know what needs to be changed.

Nancy Abila (nancya@oreilly.com, ext. 516) is the most familiar with the finer aspects of weblogs and how they work within the CS system, and is the person who updates the cover of oreillynet.com for new "top" weblogs. She also gets new weblog authors started with the system.

Terrie Miller (terrie@oreilly.com, ext. 517, AIM hrefinsanity) can help with most questions and can refresh any edited content that may appear in an earlier form on our site, especially for the OSCON coverage page.