Community Blogging Platforms: What can I use to build a community blogging site

December 23, 2008 11:54 AM

Community Blogging Platforms: What can I use to build a website allowing users to create content that can then be voted upon or pushed by the administrator to the main page? Any language...

Right now, I run a sports blog that has about a fanbase of 200 users. Many maintain contact with the site through the RSS feed, emails, etc. but I'm looking for a community solution to bring everyone together.

In a nutshell, I want more than just myself blogging. My blog would be the main page, homepage, whatever you want to call it, but I want to enable users to register, create their own pieces of content if they so choose, and it would be listed on some type of feed on the sidebar or something to that extent as additional content.

If I want, I can add it to the main site's Blog feed on the main page. Basically, I want a community blogging software that will work in this manner.

I looked at Drupal, but I need someone's expert advice on if Drupal can do something like this as I'm an ASP.net Developer and haven't dabbled in PHP and Drupal in a long time. I'd need to integrate my CSS layouts to Drupal of my current site as well, which doesn't look enticing to me as I'm not a fan of PHP syntax.

Any suggestions on open source or any type of software that does this?

posted by MMALR to computers & internet (22 comments total)

7 ways to create your own Digg clone
posted by mattbucher at 12:12 PM on December 23, 2008

Pligg (featured on the link above)
posted by nitsuj at 12:14 PM on December 23, 2008

Take a look at Movable Type and Expression Engine. MT might be more suited to the community aspect of what you're going for, but you really should check out EE if only for its template engine. It is pretty much perfect, at least for my purposes, because it lets you write your regular (X)HTML/CSS and include smart tags to easily/securely pull content from the database without having to write any PHP. This isn't the exact same syntax, but should communicate the idea:

[html]
[head]
[title]sweet blog[/title]
[link rel="stylesheet" href="site.css" /]
[/head]
[body]
[h1]welcome to my uber blog![/h1]
{ee.weblog.entries limit="5"}
[div class="entry"]
[h2]{entry.title}[/h2]
[div class="content"]{entry.content}[/div]
[/div]
{/ee.weblog.entries}
[/body]
[/html]

Obviously, that's a very basic example, but hopefully it communicates the power of their approach to templates: you're not in any way limited to "their style of theme" like (I hear) you are when you write a WordPress theme or something like that. You just code your page like you would normally, and then drop their tags in to pull tasty info from the database. Neat, huh?
posted by ewingpatriarch at 12:15 PM on December 23, 2008

The problem with DIGG Clones is that I don't want to really vote up or vote down stories that users simply submit.

I want users to blog their own articles, then save them. Those articles show up on the side bar as Posts from Fans or Articles from Contributors, something to that extent. Other users can then vote them up. After say 20 votes, the story automatically gets parsed into the front pages feed.

I see how that description is like Digg, but I want to have the same blog format with postings on the front page. Not Table Rows with Voting mechanisms and small descriptions of a story.
posted by MMALR at 12:22 PM on December 23, 2008

Pligg only allows submission of stories, it doesn't allow the user to submit their own content to a user-generated blog on the same site. It's only community-based in the submission of the articles, not actually publishing.
posted by MMALR at 12:27 PM on December 23, 2008

A perfect example would be any SBNation blog site.
www.bloodyelbow.com

Notice how people can register, create their own postings, and then have them reccommended to the front page by editors. That's what I'm looking for.
posted by MMALR at 12:30 PM on December 23, 2008

If you're an ASP.net guy, try Telligent Community Server. Looks like they have a free version

Drupal is great, but you might end up doing more PHP hacking than you'd like.

Or try a white-label site that will let you create/host your community on their servers like Ning.
posted by troyer at 12:52 PM on December 23, 2008

I read this in passing about a Wordpress MU plugin called BuddyPress.

Haven't looked too deeply into it so I don't know if it can do the Digg-like thing you want with the homepage, but I'm sure there are plenty MU compatible plugins that might help.
posted by Webbster at 1:27 PM on December 23, 2008

No one has mentioned Scoop? I guess Kuro5hin has been fading for awhile now, but DailyKOS is a Scoop site and I bet people are familiar with it!
posted by sbutler at 1:33 PM on December 23, 2008

sbutler: I would have, but it felt wrong somehow. :-)

I would say, though, that Scoop is great, but you might end up doing more perl hacking than you'd like.

Incidentally, sbnation blogs are no longer Scoop, but they started out that way and the current incarnation owes a lot of features to Scoop.
posted by rusty at 1:54 PM on December 23, 2008

Well, I guess then it was a good thing that a lapsed K5 user was paying attention.
posted by sbutler at 2:02 PM on December 23, 2008

Well, I hesitate to suggest Drupal since you seem to be predisposed to reject it, but it will do what you want, and handily. And porting themes is not that hard. It can be done with minimal knowledge of PHP, as it's mostly HTML and CSS. Drupal hands you the content as variables; you just place those bits in amongst the HTML as you see fit. The more you want to tweak it, the more complicated it gets, of course, but if you already have a CSS-based site, you're halfway there. And the documentation for theming is a cut above the other documentation.
posted by bricoleur at 2:15 PM on December 23, 2008

When I read your question, it sounded to me a lot like Slashdot. Is that package open source?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:18 PM on December 23, 2008

Seriously, scoop is the way to go here; people vote up and down on articles, optionally requiring administrator approval. The state of k5 today is something you should very much consider: if you want to go hands off with the site, expect the worst. Both Scoop and Slash are open source (and in perl).
posted by pwnguin at 2:36 PM on December 23, 2008

I work with the Movable Type team, and we do this regularly for a wide variety of sites, many of which run on Windows servers (and you can even make MT publish .asp templates).

The specific setup you're describing is being used on sites like Talking Points Memo, which is powered entirely by Movable Type (albeit with some custom plugins to address their huge scale). MT is open source, and there are commercial licenses available as well, which come with professional support. I'm happy to help answer any questions if you've got them.
posted by anildash at 2:53 PM on December 23, 2008

What is your current blog running on?

I use ExpressionEngine to run PoliticalFilter.com and it sounds like it could do what you want it to do, as long as you're not intending every user to have their own blog.

You can jump in and try it or ask more questions about it first. It's not free, but totally worth it. It has a learning curve but will allow you to do most anything and the support are fantastic.

If I want, I can add it to the main site's Blog feed on the main page.

In EE, this would be a matter of assigning a default category or status to user submitted blogs , while having a different category or status for entries that run on the homepage. Then in the sidebar only running entries with that category or status. Then if you want to switch it to the main page, you go into the control panel and assign it the category that appears on the homepage. It takes a little thought to set up the structure, but that's true of any CMS.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:18 PM on December 23, 2008

@troyer: Community Server won't work I don't think as it only allows for 15 maximum blogs with the free server. I don't want to pay for an ASP.net solution. especially when I could likely program something rudimentary for this case. Problem is... I really don't want to take the time to do so, and I want something that will be smooth and allows all users to be authors.

@Webbster: I'll definitely look into MU. A brief glance looks like it may be worth looking at.

@sbutler: Scoop looks to be what I'm looking for, but I wonder how much haggling I'd have to do with Perl. I haven't really looked at Perl in over 5-7 years time.

@bricoleur: Does the Community authoring piece come as an add-on or module or some sort? I didn't really see the functionality within it.

@anildash: So, MT actually allows me to have a community, user sign-ups, and then allows them to author their own little blogs that can be reccomended to the front page? I haven't messed with MT in quite some time, but that was back when I was still learning the trade. Maybe it's time to take another look.

@Brandon Blatcher: I'm currently running BlogEngine.NET on my blog, which works perfectly fine after I added my own customizations to the code, but it's fairly new in the ASP.net Open Source scene. Not tons of features yet or extensions. No functionality to allow multiple blogs. EE is expensive for a commerical license, which is one reason I steer away if I can find something free that can get me where I want to go.
posted by MMALR at 8:58 PM on December 23, 2008

try WPMu. check out the forums, there are plugins out there designed to do this. its free, it's open source.
posted by Davaal at 7:15 AM on December 24, 2008

Community authoring is part of the core functionality in Drupal. Just turn on the blog module and then turn on blog permission for authenticated users. If you like set the blog post content type so that it is unpublished by default, so that only the author and you can see it until you publish it. Then enable the Recent Posts block in one of your sidebars. (And you can do this same thing with content types other than blog post.)

There are a few voting modules out there. Five Star is the one that comes to mind; I've used that in the past and liked it. That might not be exactly what you're looking for, but as I say, there are others.
posted by bricoleur at 1:42 PM on December 24, 2008

Drupal.
posted by Grod at 10:12 AM on December 25, 2008

second pligg.
posted by gonzo_ID at 3:39 PM on December 28, 2008

I'm probably going to have to hit up Wordpress as I can't seem to import BlogML to Movable Type.
posted by MMALR at 5:29 PM on January 11