I have had some trouble getting prose.io to play nicely with our user blog, but after studying the priose.io starter repository I think I may have it working now (see _config.yml below). In addition to editing _config.yml as below, I also added links.jsonp to root directory of repository (the need for which and function of which is not yet clear to me).

One trick: to actually publish a new post you need to:

  1. Click new file in the _posts directory
  2. Edit your post
  3. Click save. Wait a second for commit to process.
  4. Refresh the page to get the “unpublished” button to appear in the formatting toolbar.
  5. Click “unpublished” to toggle it to “published”
  6. Save again

Alternative: If you don’t want to do the above steps, you can just enter “published: true” in the Raw Metadata field of the metadata editor (in the sidebar).

Here is what the prose section of _config.yml looks like currently:

prose:
  rooturl: '_posts'
  siteurl: 'http://jovingelabsoftware.github.io'
  relativeLinks: 'http://jovingelabsoftware.github.io/links.jsonp'
  media: 'media'
  metadata:
    _posts:
      - name: "date"
        field:
          element: "text"
          label: "Date"
          value: "CURRENT_DATETIME"
      - name: "category"
        field:
          element: "hidden"
          value: "blog"
      - name: "layout"
        field:
          element: "hidden"
          value: "post"
      - name: "title"
        field:
          element: "text"
          label: "Title"
          value: ""
      - name: "tags"
        field:
          element: "multiselect"
          label: "Add Tags"
          placeholder: "Choose Tags"
          options:
            - name: "R"
              value: "R"
            - name: "Couchbase"
              value: "couchbase"
            - name: "Node.js"
              value: "node.js"
            - name: "Shell"
              value: "shell"
            - name: "Code Snippet"
              value: "code snippet"
            - name: "Shiny"
              value: "shiny"
            - name: "ggplot2"
              value: "ggplot2"
            - name: "LINCS"
              value: "lincs"
    _posts/static:
      - name: "layout"
        field:
          element: "hidden"
          value: "page"
      - name: "title"
        field:
          element: "text"
          label: "Title"
          value: ""
      - name: "permalink"
        field:
          element: "text"
          label: "Permalink"
          value: ""