Comments on: Seeking a blogging platform

By: Sarah Hughes

Sarah Hughes — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:09:39 +0000

I was tasked to create a collaborative environment for a community of interest within my company. Since we are corporate training professionals, ELGG was my choice based on the wider community of educators. Many (if all) of our members were not initally familiar with blogging, so introducing them to other education professionals who were using this “new” technology was important. The file sharing feature and privacy controls are most used. The blogging aspect is unfortuately under-utilized, people preferring to browse rather than contribute. Best of luck with your project, I’d be curious to read about your future successes with it.

By: Bill Fitzgerald

Bill Fitzgerald — Mon, 15 May 2006 06:02:10 +0000

Either Drupal or Elgg could get this job done nicely — they both have LDAP authentication, and they are both set up to manage multiple bloggers in one install.

RE Drupal’s complexity, Drupal can be made pretty simple if you configure it well. While it has a lot of functionality, you don’t need to expose all the functionality to the end users.

With podcasting in the mix, however, Elgg merits another look. Elgg comes podcast-enabled out of the box, whereas Drupal’s podcasting capabilities are definitely in need of more development.

RE Elgg being “tied in with a larger learning environment” — Elgg can be configured so that all content on a site is private by default — individual users can override the default settings to choose to share their content with a wider audience, but Elgg could be a great solution for an blog enabled, podcast enabled, browser based file sharing, intranet on steroids Basically, Elgg can be made as public or as private as you’d like, and individual users have pretty granular control over who accesses their content.

While either Drupal or Elgg could be a good fit, Elgg is definitely worth checking out — it gives some nice functionality out of the box, and creates a clean, user centered work environment.

By: Craig Nansen

Craig Nansen — Tue, 09 May 2006 03:00:39 +0000

I would also suggest WordPress MU. Have not looked into multiple blogs by a single user, but you could always set them up with a different login for the 2nd blog.

According to the WordPress web site they will be adding multiple blogs in future versions of WordPress, but that doesn’t help you now.

We have also streamlined the creation of multiple blogs with WordPress by duplicating directories and scripting changdes to the mySQL database. Would be willing to share the steps and scripts.

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Fri, 05 May 2006 20:33:36 +0000

Chris, I should have included podcasting support in my list of requirements. It seems that b2evolution doesn’t have it. I’m afraid that takes it out of the running. (Maybe I missed it somewhere?)

By: Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann — Fri, 05 May 2006 11:03:27 +0000

We’re going to be investigating b2evolution — http://www.b2evolution.net — for use at SLA. Miguel suggested that it might do everything we want it to do — and I suspect everything you want it to do too.

By: David Czarnecki

David Czarnecki — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:34:02 +0000

Blojsom 3.0, the first milestone, is available. http://www.blojsom.com/blog/david/blojsom/2006/04/24/blojsom-3-0-M1-available.html

Blojsom does have an LDAP authorization provider that can be used to tie into your existing directory for authorization. The administrative experience in 3.0 is better than that of 2.x and it’s still improving. If I can answer any other questions or provide some assistance, let me know.

By: Fred Delventhal

Fred Delventhal — Wed, 03 May 2006 11:36:01 +0000

A nice comparison chart can be found here http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm

For our school website we use Blogger for now. http://www.apsva.us/schools/barrett

You might want to checkout Expression Engine. Looking at the chart, it appears to be the one that would meet our needs as we look to advancing.

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Wed, 03 May 2006 04:33:02 +0000

Ryan, I should have mentioned that one. Unfortunately WP MU only allows one blog per user. That may be a problem in my situation.

By: Ryan Collins

Ryan Collins — Wed, 03 May 2006 04:02:31 +0000

Be sure to check out WordPress MU (multi user):
http://mu.wordpress.org/

Multiple blogs with one installation.

By: Rob Wall

Rob Wall — Wed, 03 May 2006 03:20:39 +0000

I think any of these would work for the project that you have described. The relevant question, in my mind, would be which one will work when the project scales up in size or in scope. I don’t have a lot of experience with Elgg, but I’m trying to find a project where I can give it a try. Drupal would work nicely if you needed to scale up in size or add more functionality to the group (although I would hasten to add that you should always keep a test install to play around with adding features – painful experience is a powerful teacher). You could take a look at what has been done on http://weblogs.ucalgary.ca/ as an example.