Serendipity Forums

Hi there,

I just stumbled across s9y, so I'm not yet quite into it. My problem is, I already got a userbase based on vBulletin, so naturally I'd like to build a userbridge between s9y + vB. Now I want to offer each of the users the possibility to have their own blog without installing the script a hundred times.

Would something like this be possible with s9y without having to rewrite/adapt large parts of the code? Maybe like having one installation of the script, which is pointing to one database per user? Or even better - all in one database?

If not, will there ever be the option of setting up multiple blogs with just one installation? Could be interesting for some bigger blogging-sites, too.

Thanks in advance,
Gronkh

Hi Gronkh!

Actually, yes, there is a way to do what you want. It is called "shared installation" and documented a bit on www.s9y.org.

The principle is that you install one s9y repository as the core. You make your webserver set that path within your include path.

Then for each "miniblog" you only need to copy a few dummy files into a directory. You need to create one directory per user on your webspace, and each directory needs these dummy files plus a serendipity_config_local.inc.php which tells where the database lies and what username/password it needs. You can of course automate those few steps easily; just install one s9y instance and you can copy the DB scheme for new users each time. Services like supersized.org or serendipia.net do this kind of stuff.

The user bridge between vB and s9y is a bit harder. The reason is that s9y does quite a few SQL joins on the authors table to provide author ownership and permission groups. So you cannot use any other user system for that, as the SQL joins would need to be modified else. There is a LDAP authentication plugin as a proof of concept which authenticates against LDAP if the username is not yet existant anywhere, and then inserts a "authentication proxy" and mirrors the user into the native s9y database.

In your case you would only need one user per mini-blog, so you could automate that process to read all users from the vB database and create new subdirectories with the appropriate s9y DB scheme based on that.

HTH,
Garvin