Feedback on Drupal for campus blogging
weblogs.ucalgary.ca has been running for almost 2 weeks now, and I’ve been receiving many requests from users for features and/or refinements. Some of these may require modifications to Drupal, some may just involve configuring the existing software.
Here’s the laundry list of desired features:
- Ability for users to make their blog look like their own. This includes the page for each blog post as well. The sections.module will let an admin set up a theme to use for any section of the Drupal site (including a blog), but it gets downright funky (or impossible) to have all blog posts made by a user use that same theme. Also, an ordinary user can’t select the theme to use for their own blog – only admin users can do it. Ideally, on a “My Blogs” section, there would be a widget to let them pick (bonus points for edit as well) a theme to be used for their blog as well as all of their individual blog posts.
- Multiple blogs per user? Instead of all blog posts going into a single blog for a user, there may be a need to set up multiple blogs (perhaps each with their own theme, as well)
- Multiple authors per blog. I can use something like Organic Groups to approximate this, but it’s less explicit. Also, the ability for a user to specify the theme that will be used to display the group blog.
- When viewing a user’s blog, the “Recent Comments” and “Recent Blog Posts” blocks should only show the comments and posts from that blog – it’s confusing to users to see a global list of comments and posts on a user’s indivudual blog.
- How to export content in a usable format? Users are concerned that if they spend a bunch of time and effort contributing content to the Drupal site, that they are then locked in. They can’t export to an interchange format and then bring the content in, say, to MovableType or WordPress, or whatever. Lock-in is bad.
If these things are already possible, and I’ve just overlooked a module or setting, then that’s even better. If they aren’t possible now, I’d like to start figuring out what it would take to implement them. The “My Blogs” and related theme selection stuff is quite important for adoption on campus.
UPDATE: The blog_theme.module by Tatonca seems to do the trick for selecting a theme for a blog and all posts by a user. Check out the default theme, used for the whole site, and the theme I use for my blog (it may look familiar).
I have a blog_theme.module if you would like to give it a try – it keeps the users chosen theme persistent for their blog, image gallery, and all nodes they publish. You can get it here – http://www.blogtown.ca/files/blog_theme.module.txt – I have not been granted a drupal CVS account yet otherwise I would have put it up for everyone to have a go…
Enjoy
~Tat~
Tatonca, that sounds perfect! I’ll give it a shot first thing in the morning! Thanks!
Ok… I couldn’t wait
I checked it out, and it works great! It seems to conflict with sections.module, though (which I wasn’t really using, so I just disabled it).
Thanks again!
Tatonca, that’s almost perfect! The re-use of the user’s custom site theme may be a bit confusing, though… I’ll see if I can hack a version of this module to have its own theme selector somehow.
> Multiple blogs per user
This sounds like an issue for taxonomies. A user could categorize their post as ‘academic’ or ‘personal’. Then instead of having the blog module display all content, you could view the content through the taxonomy lens.
> Multiple authors per blog
Organic Groups has a lot of potential and works espcially well with the often-formed groups in the academic world. OG is the best way that I know of to create group blogs. Setting a custom theme seems difficult. I would do it with a combination of autopath and the sections module. You may also want to look at hacking the blog_theme module for groups.
> blocks should only show the comments and posts from that blog
This should be a relatively easy hack in the comments.module and blog.module. Look for the function comment_block(), line 154 of comments.module. blog_block() is at line 275 of blog.module.
> How to export content in a usable format?
An RSS feed seems about as close to interchangable as you will find. Drupal will even throw attachments in the feed as an enclosure. Do any other blog tools import RSS feeds and turn them into editable posts? Drupal has a module that allows turning an imported RSS post into a Drupal node.
The re-use of the user’s custom site theme may be a bit confusing, though… I’ll see if I can hack a version of this module to have its own theme selector somehow.
I agree – I hacked the user profile and stuck the themes selector under a tab called ‘Look and Feel’ with an explanation that it would set the theme for their blog as well… unfortunately the ‘look and feel’ tab didn’t appear until I created another setting under ‘look and feel’ using the profile.module – It did however reduce the support about it to null.;)
How to export content in a usable format? Users are concerned that if they spend a bunch of time and effort contributing content to the Drupal site, that they are then locked in. They can’t export to an interchange format and then bring the content in, say, to MovableType or WordPress, or whatever. Lock-in is bad.
I am working on another module right now that imports rss feeds as nodes… I think this is the feature you are looking for in reverse… so they update thier ‘blogger’ account or whatever it will import into drupal when cron runs, and then when someone adds a comment on their drupal site, it will trackback to their other site… I haven’t got anything concrete yet, but if you are interested I’ll let you know when I’ve got something usable…
Tatonca, that’s useful, but not what I need
I’m more concerned about having people spend a lot of time contributing stuff to Drupal, and then have no way to take their content with them when they leave the campus (graduate, move on, etc…). Ideally, some form of “export my blog to MovableType export format” would work best, since just about every CMS/Blog out there reads that as input.