Blogs - You don't need a hack to host blogs
 

Why does anyone feel they need a hack to host blogs on their site? Its not necessary.

1. Create a forum called Blogs
2. Select 'NO' for "Act as Forum" - Now you have your Blogs category.
3. When a user requests a blog, create a forum under Blogs. They should provide a title, a description, and whether or not they want to accept comments. You can also add options like password protect to make it private. Much more powerful control than any journal hack. Blog entries & comments count against post counts. Reputation system extends to the blogs, etc.
4. Edit the permissions for the forum. Generally, people should be able to post, but not create threads.
5. Make the requesting user the moderator of their forum. Give them full reign over the forum BUT DO NOT ALLOW THEM EXPANDED user moderation roles.

Minimal effort user blogs fully integrated into all VB functions. No hacks necessary. Future releases of VB will not break it. Blogs easily tied into subscriptions. RSS publishing as easily as any other forum. Blogs can have polls. Persistant read marks for blogs. New entries displayed via new posts. Multiple authors (moderators) for shared blogs. Ajax editing of entries. The list of things that make this better than any journal hack are nearly endless.

And just because it doesn't NEED any hacks, doesn't mean other hacks won't enhance the functionality. Use the "Split Forumhome into several pages" hack to give your blogs their own home page. Thread Description v1.2 hack to give entries a description. vbSpell to spell check entries. Post Award Hack to recognize particular entries, etc.

Worst Idea EVER!

That's not a blog, it's a hack of a forum.

Blogs can be skinned and customised. Livejournal and MySpace are great examples. Next time go check it out before you...

...Nope I'm not gonna say it. :surprised:

Wow Brinnie, that's a pretty rude response...

Fasherman is on to a possibility. You could even use vbadvanced cmps to give them the home page with it pulling latest threads from only that forum, they can customize the blocks this way and that, could tie into a gallery section for their pictures, let them create a style for their homepage look etc.

The possibility is there for this to be a very feasible option Brinnie.. sometimes you just gotta pull your head out of...

.. Nope I'm not gonna say it. :surprised:

On a side note, Fasher - I think the reason people are lookin for hacks to tie them in, is most have already created their blogs and don't want to "recreate" them. It would work well for people just starting blogs, but those that already have one going don't want to waste what they've already got going.

That's exactly what I've been mulling over lately FASherman. The only thing I'm trying to get straight in my mind is being able to provide a url to the 'blog' page - but I'm thinking if the RSS feed is stored in a directory then a domain/subdomain can easily be applied.

The first post to the thread being the blog post - subsequent replies being comments on the 'blog post'. Lock the thread if you don't want comments. It seems simple (I've only just picked up vBulletin so I'm working my head around it at the moment).

RSS can be skinned and customised, I don't really understand Brinnie's violent reaction to the idea.

This has 1 major Problem: Managability.
What if you have several Thousand Users, and quite a "few" of them want a Blog?
You'll be creating Forums all day long ...

Furthermore, it blows up forumcache massively.

Actually, a modification of my hideaway hack could do a lot of what he wants. It's just that the permissions need to be changed. Then, the users in the allowed usergroups could create their own Blog. ;)

Amy

Brinnie was the same way over at www.vbadvanced.com when he/she first joined there looking for support. It is amazing to me the outright rudeness of some people... Amazing

Just a thought, it would probably be best to click ignore on offending users and report them directly to the admin staff rather than complain about them in the threads.

Amy

I find the usergoup permissions too complicated to feel safe making users moderators. One small change in a future version and boom, moderators see something they're not supposed to. Also, way too much administration.

If vbulletin would have blogs in mind for a future version and allow users to create their own blog subforum automatically that would be great. But I don't see it happening. As it is you can't have more than about 1200 forums anyway. Because they are pulled into the datastore which has a limit.

Let's see if you're right ... 670 and counting up :D