By Vyoma on

I am thinking of migrating a blog that runs on Wordpress engine to Drupal engine.

I already have a Drupal site running on 4.7. I want to do this migration before upgrading to Drupal 5.

I know there are scripts and modules to import data from Wordpress to Drupal. But the cause of concern for me is that I am not sure if I can set up Drupal in such a way that more than one user can post to a single blog.

Yes, I am aware that there is a blog module that I can activate, but those are for single user blogs. I am not sure how to modify it to have multiple authors post to a single blog.

Here is the current setup:
My site is at: http://www.wisetome.com <-- Running on Drupal 4.7 engine
My blog is at: http://www.wisetome.com/splat <-- Running on Wordpress engine

Is there anyway, I can configure my Drupal site to have a blog to which more than one authors post?
If I activate the blog module, I get the following:
http://www.wisetome.com/blog/user1
http://www.wisetome.com/blog/user2
http://www.wisetome.com/blog/user3
... and so on.

I do not want that. What I require is:
http://www.wisetome.com/splat
or even
http://www.wisetome.com/blog/splat to which user1, user2, user3, ... are able to post to.

Comments

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

In which case, use the content type story and give your users permission to create story content. If you need more granular permission control based on taxonomy, look into the taxonomy access module, and I'd add the pathauto module for clean URLs out of the box.

Vyoma’s picture

Vyoma commented

Hey, c2uk, thanks for the quick reply. :)

I already have the story enabled for the users. They are already contributing to it. The issue is that I want a distinction to be made with in the site.

http://www.wisetome.com - will be having indepth, article based content (that will not be shown in reverse chronological order).

http://www.wisetome.com/splat - will be the blog of the site where small blurbs will be posted by multiple users (or authors).

Hope I have made it clear. Is there anyway I can use the views module or the CCK module for this? Or there is some other way?

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

Why don't you just use taxonomy to separate this blog from your other stuff? And together with taxonomy access you can give permissions to whichever roles you'd want, same with your article stuff. Plus the pathauto and maybe the taxonomy menu module you should get what you want.

If taxonomy isn't the answer, try out the Category module, which completely replaces taxonomy and makes all slightly more complex, gives you more control but is still a bit buggy.

Vyoma’s picture

Vyoma commented

I knew that I have to use Taxonomy module somewhere if I am not going to use the blog module. I already have Taxonomy module handling the different categories. May be I will add another vocabulary and have terms within them like "article" and "blog-post".

Can I give control over specific Taxonomy terms (or vocabulary) to specific people? Is there a module for that? Taxonomy access module? Could you please pass me the link if there is such?

Also, once I get the content tagged properly as "articles" and "blog-posts", then I think I will have to make use of the View module to show just the blog posts in reverse chronological order.

Another question that pops to my mind is can I have a different styling for a particular view?
 I would want this because I want to make the blog look a bit different from the rest of the site.

Edit: I did find the Taxonomy Access Module. But it still seems to be in development state for both 4.7 and 5. Is it still under active development?

More Edit: I even found it in the Documentation on theming a particular view. [Link]

So, the new questions are:

  1. Is the Taxonomy Access Module still under active development? Is it available for D4.7 or D5?
  2. Will I be able to theme a particular node depending on the taxonomy term that it has? - I would need this, because even if the theming based on path would work in showing the blog with different theme would work, I do not think that the blog posts would be shown differently, because it would have paths like /node/{node id or number} So, I would need to theme a node depending on the category it belongs to. Is that possible?
tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

Well, 5.x was lastly updated at the beginning of January, so I would assume it is still actively being developed.

I'm mainly working with the Category module, so I don't know exactly how you could structure it with taxonomy in order to achieve exactly what you're looking for but with Category it's quite simple and an access control module comes with it but as I said, it's still buggy.

Views would be a way of getting the kind of output you'd like, and there's a theme_wizard module included in that, that lets you style your list whichever way you'd like it.

Why don't you set up a test environment and just try it out before you set it up the way you'd like then on your final site? A lot of the things with Drupal is just a matter of trying it out, reading the README that comes with most of the modules (that's how I learned about the theme_wizard included in views).

And I spent literally hours working through all modules, selecting the ones that seemed promising and just tried it out on several test environments set up using XAMPP.

Vyoma’s picture

Vyoma commented

Yes, I again droned over the documentation, and again I have some more bounty. (Why is it always that I do not find these things first while searching and only find it after I ask the question?)

I think I would use the Taxonomy module and the Taxonomy Access Control module (when it is released for D5. :) I am quite comfortable with the core Taxonomy module now as it is the one organizing my site presently. So I think I will just use the Taxonomy Access Control module along with it and see how it turns out.

And yes, I did experiment a bit more with the Views and I feel that it is more suited to creating the segregated blog along with the pathalias module. And I did find something on themeing a node differently (at this link), though it does not state about themeing it differently depending on the Taxonomy vocab or term.

I guess, I will be after all spending some time on my local XAMPP based Drupal copy. :P

May be, if I crack this, I will write a site recipe on "How to create a separate multi-author blog?"

Thanks again, c2uk.

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

With regards to theming based on taxonomy terms, there's a module called taxonomy theme somewhere to be found (http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_theme). This might not be exactly what you're looking for because it lets you choose a whole different theme based on the taxonomy term rather than just a different styling of the node. However, I remember that someone has done this before in one of their projects, so if you start a new topic here for this particular question you might be lucky to get a more useful answer than I can give.

Something else, I haven't heard of a module called pathalias yet, I've been referring to pathauto (http://drupal.org/project/pathauto).

Vyoma’s picture

Vyoma commented

Hey c2uk. Yes indeed, it is pathauto. My bad. :P

I did have a look at the taxonomy_theme module. I am sure it will help me whip something out of it that I think I can make use of.

I will fiddle around with my local Drupal installation and try out somethings.

And yes, if I have any hurdle, I will be sure to ask a specific question at the Support Forums here.

Thanks!

kulfi’s picture

kulfi commented

I'm interested in creating a multi-user blog as well. I would also like to give users permission to select their own blog theme. I've briefly experimented with ...

- pathauto
- taxonomy_theme
- viewstheme
- viewtheme
- mysite

... in various combinations and permutations. No joy so far. Any ideas as to how to enable per-user blog-themes?

Thanks.

agentrickard’s picture

agentrickard
he/him
Primary language English
Location Georgia (US)
commented

There is a discontinued Blog Theme project. http://drupal.org/node/19248. It's for Drupal 4.6 but it shows the basic steps.

MySite uses the same trick. It goes like this:

1) Let the user select a theme.
2) Store that selection. (MySite stores it in the {mysite} table. You might be able to append it to user data.
3) On page request, check to see if it is the user's blog. This can be done in hook_init() or hook_menu(). See the API for details.
4) If the page is a user blog, and the user has a custom theme, invoke the global $custom_theme variable and set it to the user's custom theme.

On thinking about this, you could probably use the core theme selection utility to accomplish #1 and #2. Then you'd just need a very small module to handle item #3 and #4. You'd only need hook_init() or hook_menu() and a module.info file.

Looking at the code, I think that Blog Theme might still work. All it needs is a blogtheme.info file.

--
http://ken.blufftontoday.com/
http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2
Search first, ask good questions later.

kulfi’s picture

kulfi commented

Thanks for the details. From my experiences, mysite enables members to set the theme they see, but not a theme for their blog to be seen by others? So you're suggesting a new module?

agentrickard’s picture

agentrickard
he/him
Primary language English
Location Georgia (US)
commented

MySite theme switching only applies to Drupal paths that start with 'mysite'. That means that anyone viewing your MySite page will get the theme you have selected. See http://therickards.com/mysite/agentrickard for the example.

Since MySite theme switching _only_ applies to paths that match 'mysite/*', you would need another module (or a change to MySite module) to affect the same results for blog posts. The old Blog Theme module points the way.

This is a feature that I'm considering in MySite, but it would need to be admin configurable, I think, to let the admin determine which site paths the custom theme would apply to. For example, 'mysite/*', 'user/*', 'blog/*' and blog nodes. I simply don't have time for that right now. Patches welcome against MySite HEAD.

So I am suggesting that you revive the Blog Theme module for Drupal 5. It needs a blog_theme.info file (http://drupal.org/node/101009) and it probably needs it's own database table, since right now it relies on the user setting a global site theme.

--
http://ken.blufftontoday.com/
http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2
Search first, ask good questions later.