Software to Support a Community Blog
There was a great discussion recently about more advanced blogging tools on the always useful ProgressExchange discussion list. A number of people shared their thoughts about blogging packages that can support a multi-blogger model, where users write their own blogs and administrators can chose individual entries to promote on a home page or section pages. This is the model used by DailyKos and OpenLeft, for instance.
A number of people shared their thoughts on Scoop, which was the first package to support this model, and the one used by DailyKos. People didn’t have warm and fuzzy feelings about it– Jason Lefkowitz suggested, for instance, that you could recreate the Scoop experience by “taking a fork, covering it with salt and then sticking it in your eye.” It sounds like a very large, complex, hard to administer system, which will be substantial overkill for most needs.
Several people suggested SoapBlox instead, as a more straightforward way to mimic Daily Kos’s feature set. As Adam Mordecai of Advomatic said, “SoapBlox is extremely cheap, and it has all the recommended diary features on setup. They are moving to an open source model and the guy in charge does great work. The downside of Soapblox is you can't customize the design a great deal, and you can't add all the fun features you might with more customizable applications like Drupal.”
Speaking of Drupal, that was also recommended for this need by a number of people. It sounds like it would take more setup and configuration than something like SoapBlox, but would likely be a more flexible solution in the long run.
The relatively new Movable Type Community Solution was suggested as well, which appears to be geared to these community needs. And WordPress was mentioned, but it’s unclear whether it would support this more complex multi-blogger community model without custom code.
Jennifer Berk offers more detail on her own blog post on this topic.
Thanks to the ProgressiveExchange community for another great discussion!
A number of people shared their thoughts on Scoop, which was the first package to support this model, and the one used by DailyKos. People didn’t have warm and fuzzy feelings about it– Jason Lefkowitz suggested, for instance, that you could recreate the Scoop experience by “taking a fork, covering it with salt and then sticking it in your eye.” It sounds like a very large, complex, hard to administer system, which will be substantial overkill for most needs.
Several people suggested SoapBlox instead, as a more straightforward way to mimic Daily Kos’s feature set. As Adam Mordecai of Advomatic said, “SoapBlox is extremely cheap, and it has all the recommended diary features on setup. They are moving to an open source model and the guy in charge does great work. The downside of Soapblox is you can't customize the design a great deal, and you can't add all the fun features you might with more customizable applications like Drupal.”
Speaking of Drupal, that was also recommended for this need by a number of people. It sounds like it would take more setup and configuration than something like SoapBlox, but would likely be a more flexible solution in the long run.
The relatively new Movable Type Community Solution was suggested as well, which appears to be geared to these community needs. And WordPress was mentioned, but it’s unclear whether it would support this more complex multi-blogger community model without custom code.
Jennifer Berk offers more detail on her own blog post on this topic.
Thanks to the ProgressiveExchange community for another great discussion!
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4 Comments:
Hi there - I'm a fan of Typepad and Moveable Type for this sort of stuff. The support is great, and features / customization more than adequate for all but the most advanced. And so much more intuitive / quick to set up than Drupal (ever tried finding a Drupal expert in a hurry...who's affordable?).
See my School for Social Entrepreneurs blog which also feeds to our main website.
Am also co-ordinating group blogs for a govt-sponsored programme: see Social Enterprise Ambassadors and click on BLOGS. This is using Movable Type...which has been great (although we're only just starting!).
Cheers.
This is a great piece, but you left out a service which might be most beneficial to non-profits, because it's free!
WordPress (www.Wordpress.org) has instituted it's own solution to community blogging, where you can set up a blog just like Daily Kos, and just as free as Scoop, but much more functional, and just as beautiful as the mortifyingly expensive Moveable Type.
The only minor drawback is that Wordpress does not set up/host your website for you, like Soapblox might do -- but the fact that it's free and gorgeous definitely outweigh the minor convenience of setting up your own website, which most Orgs probably have anyway.
Check out http://mu.wordpress.org/ to see the wonderment.
>>Speaking of Drupal, that was also recommended for this need by a number of people. It sounds like it would take more setup and configuration than something like SoapBlox, but would likely be a more flexible solution in the long run.
I can't speak for SoapBlox's complexity, not having used it myself, but it is not at all true that a drupal, multi-blogging has existed in drupal since at least 2003 and is certainly not hard to set up and configure. In fact, you don't need to do anything more than tick a checkbox in drupal configuration to enable multi-blogging.
The resulting home page for the blog is actually a page where all blogs are aggregated. This is because, by default, Drupal's blogging feature supports multiple authors. Believe it or not, this (multiple authors support by default) was actually seen as a pain by many in the drupal community!
Want to extend that blog content type? Use the CCK module to add fields non-programmatically. Want to build a range of lists, pages or blocks for different ways to display blog content? Use the Views module, panels and other related modules.
True, multiple blogger support is one of the great features of Drupal, although it is, of course, much more than a blogging package.
Here are the latest examples of sites running drupal that have multiple author blogging:
http://www.momblognetwork.com/
http://www.fastcompany.com/blogs
We are considering a multiple users format. This info provided is very helpful to us.
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