individual categories?

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whyameye's picture

If drupal is to serve as a true multi-user blog, it seems to me that there needs to be a way to create categories which have only an individual scope, not a group or global scope. So for example user A should be able to create categories A,B and C for his/her blog and those categories would be available for editing/adding only to User A and associated only with User A's blog. This is exactly one of the core features of wordpressmu and resultantly wordpress.com.

I've been trying to figure out some way to mimic this behavior in drupal using primarily the already-available modules. It seems one of the first hurtles would be developing a context-dependent menu system i.e. when user B is visiting user A's blog, user B should see user A's categories as a menu. When user B visits user C's blog, user B would see user C's categories as a menu.

The module "Book Manager" might be a way to fake some of this: with that module users can create individual books. But to me users are much more used to the system of categories in a blog than Drupal's concept of chapters in a book. Moreover, using books instead of Drupal's taxonomy module for this eliminates assistance from some other really nice modules, for example "Hierarchical Select."

I also had thought "Taxonomy Access Control" and "Taxonomy Access Control Lite" might offer some help. Basically the idea was to create one hierarchical vocab where the admin would create on the root level each user as a sep category. Then each user would be given permission to edit only their level of the global taxonomy. That might have worked except that "Taxonomy Access Control" and "Taxonomy Access Control Lite" don't understand the hierarchy so as users create categories within their category, the modules don't know to allow them access to their categories. There might be a way around this with "taxonomy other" except that I am pretty committed to the "hierarchical select" module and the two modules don't play well together.

All this to say: I've been playing around for awhile now with trying to build a site that supports individual categories within a multi-blogging environment in Drupal. I'm coming up dry. Any ideas?

Comments

Multi INDIVIDUAL blogs

Boris Mann's picture

There is also Taxonomy Delegate. You could theoretically add a Vocab per user.

But really .... Drupal is not the best tool for multi INDIVIDUAL blogs. It's better as a multi-USER blog -- everyone has a blog, but has a shared "tags" vocab, some set of shared "Categories", etc. -- related posts across all users, lots of community features, etc.

WordPress MU is a better fit if you are trying to create multi INDIVIDUAL blogs.

wordpress mu vs. drupal

whyameye's picture

I would agree with you that WordPress MU is a better fit, except that I am trying to build an all-in-one site with one login, one interface, one set of things to learn, one search engine, etc. The site will be much more than just a tool for multi individual blogs. That's why I am going Drupal. And BTW I am doing shared tags for this site as well.

I think you are right that the way to go is an individual vocab per user. How would I construct a context-dependent menu for this such that when a person visit User A's blog, User A's vocab appears in a block? I thought Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module would do this for me, but I can't get it to work right. Now looking at Views2...

How about Community Tags

pkej's picture

Community Tags module seems to do what you are asking for + more.

Or perhaps a starting point

pkej's picture

It seems it keeps track of both user's tag and all other's tags for content, and is meant more like a del.icio.us tagging solution.

But, it has the correct data collection for what you need, so perhaps extending, or building on that module might be the way to go.

Individual Categories + Category Linking

nickvidal's picture

Hi John,

I was searching the same thing and you are right: Drupal doesn't support individual categories. Community Tags doesn't solve the issue neither. But this should:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/11859

We are implementing it and it should be ready by the end of this year.

Besides implementing individual categories, this project also allows to (tag)link these individual categories, thus enabling the dissemination of information in a bottom-up manner. For example, each student could create their own radio with several channels (categories). One student's Symphony channel could be linked to another student's Classic channel. Thus, a student can benefit from a personalized selection of the best music with the help of their personal social network. We are doing this with videos, but I just thought you would be interested in music! ;)

New module: Private Taxonomy Terms

pkej's picture

http://drupal.org/project/private_taxonomy

This modules enables setting a vocabulary as 'private'. With this setting enabled, each user only sees terms they have created in the specified vocabulary, virtually maintaining a "private" version of this vocabulary for each user.

That looks interesting

jcfiala's picture

I'm going to have to take a look at it later in detail, but that sounds like just the thing!

-john

-john

Except only 5.x afaik

pkej's picture

I didn't notice it was 5.x, so it via new modules rss, and clicked blithely to the page assuming noone wrote a new module for 5.x without a 6.x version, or at least making a 6.x version only.

I've tried this one; and it

benahlquist's picture

I've tried this one; and it does everything we're all looking for—almost. When the taxonomy terms are made "private" (as the module calls it), they REALLY become private. No user (un/authenticated, even admins) can view these terms anymore, except for the user that created them.

Which is fine on the backend (although I have my qualms about Admins not having access). But on the front end, this does not do the functionality you and I are both looking for.

Oh, the developers HAVE released a Drupal 6x version now; worked flawlessly, aside from this missing feature.

Thanks!
ben

This seems like a real

benahlquist's picture

This seems like a real roundabout method, and a lot of work to set up (when it might not actually work); but what if you ditched the core blog module and created a new content type (blog post) for each individual user? Then, create a separate (category) taxonomy for each content type. I haven't tested this, but am going to give it a shot later this afternoon; I'll let you know my results.

Of course, this does two negative things I can see right away. Admins will have an even longer list of content types to parse through when adding content. And, every time a new blogger is added to the team you'll have to go through all the steps again.

Sure it's cumbersome, but will it work is the real question =)

-ben

I have got a same problem

Yu's picture

Does someone have the best solution for this issue?

Multi-user blogging

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