Giving blogs with Drupal
This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!
How can you give blogs with Drupal?
Drupal allows you to very simply provide blogs for each member of a particular Drupal community, it’s not hard at all. The php system is pretty simply to set up by anyone with a rudimentary understanding and you’ll even get it available as an auto installer with a lot of hosting packages. Blogs run through the basic install and you can add extra features through modules such as the one allowing particular themes to work. In fact it’s this modular functionality (name a function… you can be pretty sure you can get it in Drupal if you want) which sends most first time users crazy about Drupal. For example someone considering giving blogs will be pretty happy with LDAP integration, FOAF support, Folksonomies and a whole lot more.
How do the blogs work?
You could see as either one of the systems strongest or weakest points that posting to your personal blog is disarmingly simple, just roll over to your account bar and create content for your blog. Perhaps the most significant stumbling block for a first time installer however is to get around the conceptual differences between a ’story’, ‘page’ ‘blog’ and so on and that to a large degree this simplicity is based on a pretty solid understanding of this kind of vocabulary and the Drupal system.
Simplicity also rules in that unless you’re going to install WSYWIG modules (not hard, incidentally) or get under the hood to play with the ‘promote to front page’ options and so on then users are going to feel a bit more like they’re posting to a forum / form / community site than a personal blog. But that isn’t to say that these are going to be significant stumbling blocks. Play around under the hood enough and you can get a system that is pretty smooth, functional and will work well as a publishing platform.
Other stuff
It’s the feeling that you’re not posting to / controlling your own blog though which is probably the biggest challenge for Drupal as a multi user blogging tool. In many ways this is unavoidable as the system has been developed to support communities, rather than decentralised individuals, which means that while it’s great for that purpose (focused community, definite aims and goals, established or establishing relationships) when it comes to independence, control and the presentation of yourself outside of that particular community, it’s not that great. This is something I’ve expanded on previously in centred communication.
On a very basic level there’s really no control over sidebars and the control over themes is also very limited:
“Blog theme allows users to have persistent themes for their blogs based on the theme they choose for their account. When others view their main blog page, or any node created by them, the reader will see the authors theme instead of their own.”
Which means that while there’s a lot of potential for specific community work… side projects if you will, there’s a big challenge to uptake over the longer term.
How would you use it?
With that in mind I wouldn’t use Drupal to give people blogs on a continuing basis but I would use it (and the blogging feature) to work through a particular project, course or community event. Essentially I’d recommend Drupal as a community tool, you could incorporate other, more effective blogging tools with using features like it’s public aggregation service. It’s a great product and one that I use widely… but you can’t be all things to all people!
Particularly interesting examples of the use of Drupal in these kind of settings are spreadfirefox and Urban Vancouver.
Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.
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August 12th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
[…] 8217;s the initial list: Giving a Blog - Tools (open source) 1. WordPress Multi User 2. Drupal 3. pLog 4. Blojsom 5. Roller (commercial) 1. Moveable Type 2. Manila Giving a Blog - Exam […]
August 12th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
[…] ve people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff! How can you give blogs with Drupal? Drupal allo […]
August 12th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
I’ve just done some tweaking on the weblogs.ucalgary.ca service, and it’s really feeling quite blogish… With most of the non-blogging bells and whistles turned off, it’s actually a pretty sweet community blogging system. Heck, it’s even using a similar theme to my WordPress blog.
August 12th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
It’s almost a strain to turn them off though ‘aint it ;)
Seriously though there are *real* limitations with themes / sidebars / plugins etc. etc. - which is stuff that long-term bloggers are definitely up with…
Thanks for commenting BTW, you;re walking the walk over there so all and any thoughts on this are very much appreciated!
August 15th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
Drupal is what we use for both our blogs@si and blogs@pgsit project. We’ve actually had good success with both. I will say that the blogs@pgsit site was used as more than just a set of community blogs … we used them to suppport a curriculum. The students who used the space had little trouble figuring it out, but wanted a little more control over the look of the space. I’m also not sure if they saw it as a “real” blog — Drupal (at least in the way we’ve been using it) just looks and feels different, so it takes a little getting used to. All in all, they rated the experience very high however.
We also just recently redeisgned our College’s student information portal, IST2U, to live on Drupal. It used to be a miss-mash of Flash and communication server. It was a real pain and didn’t give students the ability to subscribe to various feeds. As a matter of fact, that has been the most powerful feature we’ve discovered/utilized with Drupal — the category/taxonomy engine. The ability to use a category browser to build and provide custom category driven searches and feeds is really nice.
Thanks for doing this … hopefully it will spark some real conversation!
August 16th, 2005 at 11:01 pm
Yes, lmost exactly how I feel about Drupal. I was really hoping to be able to hav much more identity around the individual users blogs. Its essential ie your “centered communication” concept. Whats even more worrying is that I dont sense any perception of this weakness amongst the core developers driving the community. Id really be tempted to roll up my sleeves and do something about it - If I had the skills and the time, but alas I doubt I could impact it, and so its a shame. However not all is necessarily lost with Drupal, in fact, necessity as they say , is the mother of invention. Maybe the weakness can be turned into a strength. There is a halfway house which may in fact be whay I was looking for but more. Namely Groups. Grops sit halfway between an individual focus and the full community space. As they are intended I still dont like them that much. I feel forums that typically become the way of group communication is even a step back from the identity driven conversations that blog networks provide. But lets consider for a moment what would happen if we made each group owned by an individual. That is its not really intended as a group at all but is a personal space that can allow for permissioned access to more private content while still allowing other content by users to be viewed outside of the group. Consider the Drupal “personal ” driven group as almost a personal social networking tool to go with the blog. Then if its done well you have something not dissimilra to the latest round of innovation at yahoo360.
So give each person a personal group to go with a blog. Let them use buddylists as a social network and communications tool. The blog content can get sliced and diced with tags as needed. Further to try and keep the blog/personal communication centric benefits, banish forums, also stories, books etc (at least to begin with) for simplicity and to focus the content on blogs. Possibly have the makings of a cantereskue DLA.
Maybe this is tretching what the drupal community can come up with but its tempting to think it can. The Organic groups just needs a little more work.
BTW, though Ive wavered, I am still delaying my dive into wordpress until Drupal absolutely proves its inability to come up with the goods.
All the best James, and well done with everything - excellent sites/offerings/clear community focus/thought leadership - friendly help, though I dont know where you find the time.. Mark
August 17th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Yeh, I like the ‘opt in’ groups function… I’ve used it in setting up ‘virtual teams’ in large courses… Drupal definitely has some excellent uses (I mean, I certainly wouldn’t use a blog for ‘a course’ or a particular community or a whole number of things).
I think one of the things that really tempts people is the ‘everything in one package’ approach which, as Stephen said a bit back, never really works… what we should be doing is looking at a suite of tools than do great things and bring the best out of each other through some healthy competition… with interoperability!
Elgg are doing some really cool things with this at the moment.
Hang on, I should really cover Elgg in this series…. duh.
September 9th, 2005 at 1:06 am
[…] Blojsom, Roller, Elgg e Manila). Pubblicato in Novità e aggiornamenti da Sergio Maistrello alle 16:57 | […]
October 24th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
I just got back from Amsterdam where Adrian Rossouw gave a mind-blowing, eye-popping demonstration of where Drupal is going in this regard. Expect the next 6 months of Drupal to reveal a far more powerful multi-user blogging system that puts total control over themes in the user interface and happily solves the decentralized vs. user community conflict.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
they’ve been saying that for a while… don’t get me wrong I reckon Drupal is ace at lots and lots of things but blogging isn’t really one of them and I’m not really sure if it’s doing itself any favours by trying to cover that base too…
October 24th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
[…] Drupal is an excellent content management system or focussed community management application that doesn’t really cut the mustard when it comes to providing multiple blogs. Technically perfect but is limited by a focus on the group rather than the individual. Worth a look as this might be what you’re after. Read the complete review. […]
October 24th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
re James: The difference is that a group of the top Drupal developers want to support multi-user blogging in a better and more comprehensive fashion. The developers involved have a good track record, and coding is underway. Of course, anything not finished and not released is vaporware, but damn, the stuff we saw was very exciting.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Youve aroused my interest, could you shed more details or link to them, or do we just have to wait and see what you saw :-)
Actually I nearly moved to WP becasue of this issue, have started to take wordpress for a spin anyway, but if drupal can deliver a similar capability then would prefer that.
Its interesting that you say all the top developers are keen to see this happen in drupal (real multi user blogging) because Id seen many comments shooting doen the use of real user blogs in drupal. Whatever if this is the case it gives drupal a good shot in the arm from where Im sitting. Thanks for the heads up Robert.
BTW, James Im keen to know how you integrate the edublogs running on WPMU with the drupal community site you created. Because using a wpmu/drupal combo seems like a good approach, if data continues to become more open & better exposed through api’s and so on
October 24th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
Mark: Well, there is disappointingly little on the web about it at this point, but you can get some hints here:
http://www.acko.net/blog/degradable-javascript-widget-fun
http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/
The idea is that blogs in Drupal should be easily themable from the UI, and that they should not only pour their content into the mother-site, but should also be accessible as a stand-alone blog with its own URL.