Posted by choloepus on August 9, 2010 at 1:49pm
What is the best way to organize blogs on the newspaper site?
Media companies being different beings have a different set of requrements:
- multi-user blogs (many users can post to one blog, and no other blogs)
- site-wide "web editors" that have ability to change any post on any blog
At the moment, it looks like Organic Groups is the only solution.
Have anybody done anything like that?
Comments
OG overhead
We tried that approach back in the early days of Drupal 5 on Jacksonville.com to support multiuser blogs like "Sports Desk Nation." We immediately ripped it out due to performance concerns.
To get multiuser blogs on D6, we wrote our own module and turned off blog.module. In our implementation each blog is a node, and therefore can have a title/description/special graphic/et cetera, including user relationships so more than one user can post to the blog. The blog node owner can grant the permission.
When you display the blog node, you pull in a view that renders node teasers for the individual posts (which are a second content type).
Early on, we had a serious UI problem; people would create a blog and immediately start typing a post on the blog node (which is really just a container). The error rate was nearly 100%.
To fix that, we removed "create blog" from the user menu. If you "create blog post" and you don't already have a blog, the system silently creates a blog node for you. Later you can edit it, change the title, upload a header image, and so forth.
If you have rights to post to two or more blogs, a node relativity selector in the "blog post" content type lets you choose which one.
We never got around to creating a user-friendly way to add multiple blogs per user; admins can do it, but regular users never see the option because of the aforementioned human error rate.
All of this is terribly complicated and probably a case of overengineering to meet an extreme edge condition.
The truth is we never see more than three or four multiuser blogs at any newspaper.
Given that case, it might have been simpler to just create a view for each multiblog. Or just say "no ... blogs are personal."
Here's how we do it at my
Here's how we do it at my paper ... maybe its not very fancy but its pretty simple.
Basically every story is a node (of the type article).
And we created a vocabulary called "sections" which is how we divide the different topics the paper covers -- zones, sports, business, opinion, etc.
A blog is an article that has been assigned to that blog title's section. (E.g. in the vocabulary sections, there is a term "Blogs" and the blog "In the crease" is a child term of Blogs).
Then I use views to get a list of all nodes of type article that have been assigned to that term.
Then I use panels to make that view pretty. :)
I don't even touch the blog module ... if I need nice paths I'll make them using the URL Alias tool, and this way anyone who can make an "article" node can assign it to a blog.
This would work, since this
This would work, since this is all about taxonomy/categorization, but the access control in between the individual blogs is not there.
Should I do node-by-node access control?
That is true, anyone can post
That is true, anyone can post in any blog, but we trust our staff that they wouldn't do that.
You could make each blog a different node type, then you could use node access control. But that might generate a bit more work, as you'd have to have different views and templates for every different blog.
Open Atrium seems like the ticket but
Open Atrium seems like the ticket:
"Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all."
But I want to stick with drupal + modules. Is it possible to mimic open atrium using drupal + modules? Looking for opinions, please help.