John,
Are we talking about new blogs or new blog posts here? Each blog serves as a "container" for blog posts. Do you want each user to have his own blog, or do you want to have a single blog, with multiple users posting to it?

Hi Denis,
Each User to have their own blog.

We want to emulate the functionality on Macmillan whereby any User, when logged, in can create a blog. The Macmillan functionality is at http://community.macmillan.org.uk/blogs/default.aspx but you have to log in to see the simple 'create blog' screen.

We want to set up a process where the User sets up the blog but before it is visible to the world an Editor (not the portal Administrator) can approve the blog and publish it.

You would have to change the blog creation process significantly to suppoort this. Here are a few suggestions:
- I have posted some code for per-user blog creation in one of the earlier support threads: http://www.mono-software.com/Mono/Pages/Discussion/dtopic/jQYy1_fP8EKrc56gAOJw2A/NA/?dbmpageno=1&dmsgid=_xYfR83BDUeI_J6mAQaAlw#dbmPageNopg
- mail alert sending is realtively easy, look into the MonoSoftware.MonoX.Mail namespace, for example
- the approval step will require a new Web part/page. If you would like to avoid it, you could use the strategy from our account activation part, where clicking on a link in the mail message would approve a blog. However, sooner or later a separate approval UI will have to be developed.
- Blog entity by default does not have the "approved" indicator (blog post entity holds IsPublished field, but it is under the control of the original blog post author). You could either change the source of thedata layer to support it, or get around it by assigning approved blog authors to a separate role, and that filter blogs by that role.

Thanks for your reply. We will take forward.

Further challenges we're having with blogs.

On some occasions the Blogs in the Blog web part show up (it makes no difference whether editors and/or users are logged in or out) and sometimes there is just a blank space. We are not editing web page settings at the time so we cannot understand the inconsistency.

The words "No blog posts were found for the required criteria" are always appearing on the blog web part. We've been thru' settings and content may times over and cannot see where this text is coming from or why it is being displayed.

Finally, there are two blog lists appearing containing identical information. We've minimised one so it does not display. We cannot find the setting/control to work out what is happening. Please advise.

Thanks

I would have to see your project to be able to answer questions 1 and 3. As for the text "No blog posts...", it is coming from the resources, BlogResources.NoBlogPostsWarning key. It is being set very early in the BlogPostList Web part lifecycle (OnInit event handler), and you could inherit from it and override the behavior.

Thanks Denis, following the "No blog posts ..."
We don’t want to override it but we do want our posts to meet the required criteria. Presumably that way the message will not appear.

So specifically: What are the required blog posts criteria the system is looking for?

Can we specify these required criteria generally or on a blog by blog basis and, if so, where?

If we cannot specify the criteria where do we enter the required criteria on the blogs so that they do display, i.e. we do not get the message "No blog posts..."

Thanks Denis, Pl close this post