I'm a freelance Drupal developer who loves enabling organizations switch to free and open source software.
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Multi-user blogging: DrupalMU
Dec 05, 2007 in blogroll, drupal, drupalmu, installation profile, multi-user blogging, wysiwyg
Last year I did a comparison between Drupal and WordpressMU in terms of how both relate in terms of the multi-user blogging experience. The conclusion was that WordpressMU had all the bells and whistles and that it was clearly more experiences in terms of end-user friendliness and usability, but that it lacked the much more mature technical implementation that Drupal could offer. I made it my personal battle plan to set up an installation profile for Drupal, developing any missing modules in the process, to bring the best possible multi-user blogging platform both in terms of usability and technical stability. I dubbed it DrupalMU.
Things are starting to come apart real nice and I created a Multi-user blogging group to discuss some important topics and combine efforts. There remain some important decisions to take like which WYSIWYG to choose or how to best define blogrolls for instance. Feel free to hop in and share your ideas on both usability and technical implementation.
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XStandard fr WYSWIG
http://drupal.org/node/60720 is for the port of XStandard to Drupal. It's highly rated by some as very functional cross browser and platform while being standards compliant. Freeware and Open Source expanded freeware releases are available.
What else is happening with your quest now? What needs to be developed?
A
Automatic subdomains
One of the things that WordpressMU can and do is automatic subdomain without DNS games. I have tried that and it works amazingly easy!
My knowledge of Apache, DNS and every other server technology is far from useful, but if that could be done in Drupal I would have nothing to say in favor of WordpressMU.
I like in WordPress general easiness of site production, even customization, but as you said, if you want step deeper from mere blogging, you're out of luck.
Someone somewhere else said that Drupal lacks something and you corrected that there is a module for that. There are tons of modules and real problem is how to make a choice or how to find what you need when it is hard to find what is available (esp. if you're unsure how things work, e.g. newbie).
I would like to have a rating by each module by download and satisfaction together with alternatives and their rating, like Mac-centric site www.iusethis.com. That really drives toward greater usefulness.
DrupalMU instalaltion profile
we want to create a multi user blogging system in our university ,we want to bloggers select their own theme easily.However, We could not find an installation profile for DrupalMu. Where can we find the name of modules to craete a multi user blogging system in the way that we want?
drupalMU subdomain
I agree with the comment above, in wordpress a users want to register for a blog can get a subdomain instantly, if you can do that with drupalMU that would be great...
gudluck on your project.. more power!
blog_theme module
To have the users select their own theme, just redirect them to their own user page. You can use the blog_theme module for the effect you want. You can find a list of useful modules in my first article: Multi-user blogging: Wordpress vs Drupal.
I'm currently working a DrupalMU installation profile but there is currently no version ready for download. You are free to join the Multi-user blogging group to see what the status is and to provide feedback, that would be great.
Blogroll and WYSIWYG
Currently the two most important components that are missing are the blogroll and the WYSIWYG. The issue with the blogroll is that there are many ways to implement it technically, but I'll go ahead and give it a shot myself. The deal with the WYSIWYG is a lot harder: the issue is not so much a technical one but a matter of licensing. Any code included with a Drupal installation should in term be GPL licensed as well. XStandard for instance falls under a custom freeware license, so we are not allowed to include it with the installation file. This discussion is currently going on in the Multi-user blogging group, it would be great if you could share your points there with the community.
subdomains + rating
That is indeed not something I had thought of and I will certainly take it into account. I'll check how WordpressMU does that because I do think there is some dns changes to be made (*.yourdomain.tld will need to point to the webserver).
As for the module rating, that's being worked on for drupal.org and I'm certain the result will be great!
subdomains for DrupalMU
That would indeed be a very powerful feature and that's definitely something I want in eventually. There's lots still needing to happen :)
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