The currently available features (as of 10th December 2009) of CanalPlan Blogs are:
- Easy Linking to CanalPlan AC Gazetteer entries (including canals and canal sections) when posting
- Automatic expansion of CanalPlan Links when viewing posts
- Importing of CanalPlan AC Routes to create bloggable trips.
- Support for a Trips Page on each blog which shows blogged trips.
- Embbeded GoogleMaps for CanalPlan Locations and canals.
- Snap Preview available
- Twitter Integration (Show Tweets on your blogs, create blog posts from Tweets, create Tweets from blog posts)
- Google Latitude support via a widget. Update your location from your phone. Lattitude Wdget for your blog shows the nearest Canalplan Location below the Googlemap.
- Facebook Integration – Post etntries and they can be cross posted to your Facebook Account. Supports Bi-directional comment posting so comments on the FB replicated post will be bounced back to your blog. Comments on your blog get copied back up to your Facebook posting. Facebook Widget for your blog shows FB photo and current FB status.
- Site Wide search – search across blog titles, posts, comments, and tags.
- Approximately 40 themes available
- A Support Forum is also available
- Tags and a Tag Cloud – Both LOCAL (i.e your blog) and GLOBAL (i.e all Blogs)
- Home Mooring and Favourite Places. Allows easy insertion of regularly visited locations into your posts
- Open Search Enabled – Adds Canalplan Blogs search directly into the FireFox Search box.
- A Calendar – Once the plugin is enabled you need to create a special page and you have an embedded calendar which can be found at your base blog url with /calendar appended to it. For example : http://blogs.canalplan.org.uk/calendar/
- Support for embedding various media types (shockwave, YouTube etc) directly into posts
- Last.FM Widgets – display your Last.FM Charts in the sidebars
- Flickr Albums – easily insert photos from Flickr into your posts
- Embed “forums” in a post which allows registered users to Discuss that post. This was added to allow Nick to post stuff about new features and get feedback on them.
- Mobile Support. Blogs are now very readable on mobile devices such as the IPhone or the Android platform.
- Beta Version of Canalplan AC now back linking to blog entries. For an example : Marbury Woods Footbridge
- Alinks installed – This allows you to automatically turn words in your blog to hyperlinks
- Blogger
- LiveJournal
- Textpattern
- RSS
- DotClear
- Movable Type
- Typepad
- GreyMatter
If you already have a blog elsewhere and would like to move here, we provide several import options that can import posts and comments from the blogs below: