Adding member blogs to a website - suggested software?

[danthewhaler]

Hi,

I have a niche website that currently has a forum (Vbulletin) and picture board (PhotoPost). I’ve been thinking about adding the ability for members to set up blogs within the site. I’ve spent a while looking around for software, but you never really know until you try, so can anyone suggest any software (free or paid) that would be suitable? These are issues I've thought will need to be addressed:

I want to set up a blog when members request it and then leave it entirely for them to deal with – preferably no further effort from me.

Multiple blogs. Entirely separate and password protectable.

Ease / difficulty of set up and administration - To give an idea of my competancy here, I have installed a phpbb and Vbulletin boards before and found these straightforward, PhotoPost was a complete pain in the a** – I did get there in the end, but don’t want to repeat anything like the process again!

From the member bloggers point of view it will of course need to be as easy to use and flexible as possible.

Any pointers would be gratefully received – Paul

[rogerd]

There are several hacks at vbulletin.org that do part of what you want. There's one that lets users add bloglike comments to their own page, though when I last checked it seemed to offer minimal functionality compared to, say, Wordpress.

There's also a Drupal integration hack that might work.

A while ago, one of the developers commented that they would probably introduce a blog function for vBB 3.5 to show the utility of the plug-in architecture, but to my knowledge that hasn't happened.

[danthewhaler]

Thanks for the reply rogerd. I'll explore the facility through vBulletin - never thought of that. Currently looking at MoveableType too, just emailed them about their various licences.

Paul

[rogerd]

There's also a mass blog tool, i.e., one that does multi blogs with central admin, etc. Anyone remember the name of that?

I think there was a hack for WordPress, too, but I'm not sure what the status of that is at the moment.

[zulu_dude]

You might also want to take a look at b2evolution. It allows multiple users.

There is also a multiuser hack for wordpress, available at mu.wordpress.org.

[ChuckZilla]

I am thinking about doing the same thing. I have community server installed; I just haven't had time to spend getting blog templates approved and user priviledges set. If you are on Windows I hear community server is a viable option.

Chuck

[Beagle]

Invision has a blog option, as well as one for picture galleries. If you're already using Vbulletin that's probably not of interest to you, but it might be to someone else reading the thread. (There is an extra cost for each of those options.)

[rogerd]

I've heard the multiuser version of WordPress isn't quite industrial strength yet, but that was a while ago. Is anyone using a massively multiuser WP setup?