Comments on: Giving blogs with Drupal

By: Robert Douglass

Robert Douglass — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 13:11:33 +0000

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.

By: mark ranford

mark ranford — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:50:07 +0000

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

By: Robert Douglass

Robert Douglass — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:18:27 +0000

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.

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Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:28:26 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: James

James — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:18:56 +0000

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…

By: Robert Douglass

Robert Douglass — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:10:57 +0000

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.

By: Come si fa un blog » WordPress.com, uno sguardo dal vivo

Come si fa un blog » WordPress.com, uno sguardo dal vivo — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:06:21 +0000

[...] Blojsom, Roller, Elgg e Manila). Pubblicato in Novità e aggiornamenti da Sergio Maistrello alle 16:57 | [...]

By: James

James — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:13:24 +0000

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.

By: mark ranford

mark ranford — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 13:01:38 +0000

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

By: Cole Camplese

Cole Camplese — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 11:31:46 +0000

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!