By jivyb on

I am thinking of using blogger instead of drupal's blog function because my users need something very simple (simpler than using the drupal web interface)--with blogger, they can add pictures to their posts directly from picasa and they can email posts as well. You can even post from Word. I can add the feed to drupal's aggregator and get the blog to roughly display within my site, but I'm wondering if there's a better way to go about this. Here's a discussion on using php to post to blogger here

Has anyone else tried to use blogger so directly with drupal or does anyone have some ideas of how to do this in a better way?

Thanks!

Comments

gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

But if you're sole reason to use blogger's blogs instead of the drupal interface is the use of picasa, then you can tell your users to user w.Bloggar which does the same for Drupal.

My site revolves around people I know.. and they already had blogs when the site was launched.. so I had to aggregate their blogs..

Aggregator2 works great and does the needful(example), though the only 'major' drawback of doing this would be when/if your server stops fsockopen() from doing its job. For security reasons some servers have been known to change their policy to restrict users from using XML-RPC functions on shared hosts.. (I forgot where, but I did find a discussion on this problem)

I personally was once stranded for a week wondering what I could do, since my own server started giving errors and I couldnt update the feeds. Fortunately it was a bug in my server, and they had not intentionally stopped the service. :-)

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I suggest you check out w.Bloggar and also check your servers policy...

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One more idea that might help (if your site is more of a personal nature and you know your users well) is to look up the mailhandler module.

The blogger dashboard has an option to email a post once it is published to a specified email address. You can specify an address from your site in this place. Mailhandler module publishes these as and when the linked email address recieves a mail.

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Best of luck!
Gautam Chandna

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http://www.ahste.com

jivyb’s picture

jivyb commented

I checked out w.bloggar and it does look useful except that it requires you to manually add a file path to add a picture, which would be prohibitive compared with picasa where the user can see the picture and then click "blog this". For people new to a computer, entering a path is way too complicated. I was surprised that clicking on the image icon didn't bring up a windows style file browswer or anything. Is that right, or am I missing something obvious?

And, I don't have cvs, so I'll have to wait to use aggregator2, which also sounds great. I'll check out mailhandler, though.

Thanks again!

rcross’s picture

rcross commented

This is a way to move from blogger to movable type - might be way of writing a drupal module or php script that takes the blogger file and updates it to drupal ... just a thought

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/hacks_upgrading_to_movable_ty...

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
James Cross Construction Services
Project Management Software