I'm trying to extend Drupal into a multi-user blogging site comparable to WordpressMU.
I choose Drupal primary because for my love for Drupal and its flexibility but Drupal does have it short coming when trying to tackle WordpressMU.
Also, ultimately I will be hosting a blogging service, using WordpressMU will make me a shadow of Wordpress.com. Going Drupal is a bold move, but I believe a smart move because architecture and design wise, I believe Drupal is far more superior then wordpress.
Although I myself won't be using DrupalMU at the moment, opting to go from the scratch. I would like to try and find common grounds between us and hopefully I am able to contribute to this community as well. I will release my work if I ever get some decent stuff going.
Here is some of my requirements:
Blog Management
* Multiple users editing a blog.
Theme Management
* User able to choose their theme.
Comment Management
* User are able to administer its own comment.
Tagging
* Only tags created by its user are available to its respective user.
WYSIWYG
* Wordpress like WYSIWYG.
Widget
* Support for widgets.
Administration
* Dashboard
* User-friendliness
Module Management
* Able to run their own module
Subdomain
A good theme (even if it cost) that would help me achieve my goals.
To be continue...
I hope to achieve these the Drupal way. I will try my best to avoid going the WordpressMU solution of creating tables for each blog user but I'm not ruling out the possibility as Drupal does support Multi-site installation and certain things seems difficult to implements without going that route.
I will share my research and finding with this community. Cheers.
Comments
I'm working on that too.
I've got something that does a lot of that, but it's still in development.
The different themes would be done using the Theme Key module.
-john
-john
Theme management
I think that theme management is best done using the Blog Theme module, it provides complete integration with the core blog module. ThemeKey doesn't seem to switch themes based on the user, or to let the user choose his own theme so I don't think that it's appropriate for this project.
Re: Theme management
Blog Theme may be best for standard blogs, but the direction I've been going has been to skip the core module and instead set up blogs as taxonomy terms - which allows two users to be able to contribute to the same blog, functionality you don't get with core blog, unfortunately.
-john
-john
using taxonomy instead of blog module
Interesting! What module are you using to set and control taxonomy permissions, so people can only post to their own blog? How transparent is it to the user? That is, do they need to set the taxonomy for their posts, or is it set automatically for them based on their username?
Re: using taxonomy instead of blog module
The module we're using is currently called 'ownterm', and hasn't been released yet, although we're hoping to - I've been a little too busy with other modules to get it ready for public release. It's very transparent - the user wanting to blog goes to his user page, clicks on the 'Create Blog' tab, adds a name and description for his blog, and from then on when he goes to create a new node of that type, the taxonomy is indeed pre-selected for him if he's only able to post to one blog.
Which is another bonus of using taxonomy - in addition to being able to have more than one user post to a blog, you also have the ability for users to set a blog name and description - and with taxonomy-extension modules you can add further bits.
-john
-john
release?
would it be possible to release it, or even just attach a .gz of the module in a comment in this thread?
I'm solving a very similar problem in the next week, and would prefer to collaborate with your code base than create and release my own solution.
Sorry - it's released now -
Sorry - it's released now - http://www.drupal.org/project/ownterm.
-john
Would really like to see
Would really like to see something's happening that includes this feature.
Organic groups module allows
Organic groups module allows multiple users to contribute to the same blog, where each group = blog.
Theming can be done accordingly.
What Drupal really does not offer and hugely lacks in comparison to true blog services like wordpress or blogger is
- allowing single user to have multiple blogs
- allow archive calendar side block and automatic monthwise archiving of each blog by each user
update
Is this project still ongoing?
Id be happy to help if it is; drupal should be able to support MU features.