Has anyone used VB3 to run a blog?

[Ian Montgomerie]

Hi guys, I am going to start a blog but I find myself really displeased with the blogging programs out there. Blog comment threads are HORRIBLE, no matter how active they are it becomes very hard to get to them once they scroll off the front page. And of course if you end up with lots of comments, nothing beats VB3 for ability to manage them. With VB3 you could also do stuff like have public vs. private friends-only threads quite easily.

So, anyone have any tips on hacks or simple mods I could use to make something that looks vaguely like Blogger or Movable Type, but has VB3 inside?

The key seems to be to basically have a discussion board, with a seperate "blog front page" that is the default home page. I would want this page to automatically display the full text of the last N thread-starting messages from a group of selected forums. Basically I would give only myself the right to start threads in these forums, and those would automatically show up as blog posts. Then I could also have other forums where anyone can start a thread. The key is that in the blog front page you see the most recent topics in order of posting, but on the discussion board page you see all the topics in order of most recent comment.

Also there could be a "view by topic" option on the blog front page that just selects one particular forum for viewing. So if for example I had a "politics" forum that I post to, then someone could go to a page that displays the first post of each thread in that forum. And so on.

[Colin F]

Actually all you'd have to do is edit the templates.

You can change a huge part of the appearance solely through template modifications... and depending how you do it, you might not even realize that it's powered by vBulletin

[Paul M]

We run the vbJournal - customised to say blog rather than journal. It's not that pretty atm, but it's functional, and we can work on the appearance at our leisure.

[Ian Montgomerie]

I actually don't mean having a journal for each user, but using a single VBulletin for a single blog (yes, I'm willing to spend over a hundred bucks for software for my blog).

Since I'm no expert at editing templates or anything like that, I was wondering if there were hacks that I could use as examples.

[AlienSector]

Honestly, I find it easier to modify the templates than spending time hacking the forum. If you use templates, you can do basic coding to pull just what you need to make it appear as a blog.

You would need to look or ask around depending on how customized you wanted it to appear, though I am sure you could just as easily achieve this with vBulletin .

[AlexanderT]

It is possible, but not as easy as just installing some Blog software. I wrote hacks and did template changes to achive something like a Blog with vB (you can visit my homepage through my profile), but today I am not sure if it was worth the trouble (I spent countless hours tweaking it). Instead, I would recommend you to install something like Moveable Type, and do a few hacks and changes to it to integrate it with vB3.