Manila to Drupal , a user/administrator's experience.

I am running a user community website on drupal , that has recently been switched over from Userland Manila. One of the most requested features , and the feature i weighted most heavily in choosing a CMS system to relaunch with .. is the ability to have 'hosted sites'.

After reading up on the different blogging engines, I realized that none of them had the ability to the extent that I would require .. although drupal would be the most likely to have the addition of such being as painless as possible, and I fell in love with the cleanliness and the amount of thought having gone into the node system.

Drupal is almost there, I am working towards making the shift as seamless as possible , but the hosted sites functionality is still the big ticket item lacking, I have old users still asking me on an almost weekly basis when the user sites will be implemented.. but I finally feel that that day is almost here.

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Manila's Functionality

User finds our website (http://www.oasismag.com) , after reading some of the current sites .. he feels he wants to contribute and have his own little corner of the web.

User signs up , and requests to 'start a site' on oasismag.
User chooses a site name , and gets his own site data on
http://mysite.oasismag.com , along with a personal gallery , static stories and site updates. User has the ability to edit a block on the left hand side which is used for his favorite links , little pictures [Navigation] .. etc.

The only exposure user gets on the main site is through a list of 20 recently updated sites (only their names) on the front page , and only the front page. And advertising in the forums.

We have content editors who we assign to keep an eye on the site updates.. and every few days do a 'columns' update , linking to the correct site updates/stories.. as these are all people with their own lives.. sometimes this fails horribly and site stays unupdated for weeks at a time.

At this point, the site looks dead to new people, even though users are continiously updating their site content.

[brief intermission, during which site dies and becomes a drupal site]

Drupal's functionality

Anonymous user sees main anouncements on page, as well as a list of who's new and the name of the recent 'site updates' (blogs). Clicking on any username sends user to user profile (new) , along with user's .sig (new, and requested feature on old site.).. user signs up .. and is capable of making his own updates (blogs) , which are now sent to a central 'columns page' (newest blogs) which is automatic and idiot proof.

With the clean url patch , it is possible for me to make www.oasismag.com/user rather easily .. which i intend to link to the 'last x blogs by this user' page.. along with all the user customizable blocks to be shown on nodes created by them ("navigation").

Firstly.. has a new standard way of getting rid of "index.php?q=", has been found.. else please some help/documentation on setting up mod rewrite for this.

Secondly .. if i want to enable 'mysite' which is seperate from the username (this is almost a neccesity for me , I am afraid) , where would the best place to put it be... Currently .. my personal preference would be to add a new column to the user table. .. the reason being ..

When setting up clean url to map mysite.oasismag.com to the latest blogs by the user who is running this site .. the problem is linking (in the new blog block) to other user's with the correct url. It would result in an extra look up , if I did not add the field there, plus it makes it simpler to edit the blog.module to just use the domain specified if it exists.

Now the advantage in my mind of doing this , is that when you specify an entire domain (ie : www.mysupersite.com , not just mysite.oasismag.com) , the link also happens.. which means that adding an entirely new hosted domain to the system is as simple as assigning it to a user.

Currently.. i only need / want a 1-1 user to site relationship, but this could be extended by also having a taxo vocab for 'hosted sites' , with the url's of the site underneath that.. and then using the taxo search functionality to display all content posted to that site.

I will have to require that group based / taxonomy based permissions are developed at that point though .. before i would allow multiple owners of one site. (ie 'admins for mysite.oasismag.com' would be a group.. allowing to post to that site).

What i like about this approach in drupal , is that it allows every piece of content to be syndicated everywhere else. Connecting my community in very many new and interesting ways that wasnt possible before. It also still allows the user to feel that he has his own space on the net .. which i can also allow him to customize much more, and much easily than manila can/could.

Anyway , these are my experiences / thoughts on having switched from manila to drupal , and I would love to finally get the full 1:1 feature match to manila right .. currently this is the only thing lacking .. but I have gotten so many bonusses (expected and unexpected) from using Drupal, that i still just blows Manila out of the water (and will soon hopefully beat it as a blog site hosting platform).