Serendipity as a replacement to MT

[axelseaa]

Currently I am support a blog system at a univeristy. Right now we are running MovableType and i'm considering switiching to s9y because its just that more cool .

The only thing is that MT allows for central user administration. I noticed what garvin wrote in a blog comment:

Hi Peke!

Thanks for your praise. It is planned to have true-multiblog support for the future, but currently no developer has raised his hand for that.

Right now, though, Serendipity can be used as a "shared installation" to power multible independent blogs from the same database.

You can have multiple dependant blogs (read: same admins, same database) by using the Category-System. With the plugin "Extended Properties for categories" you can assign different templates and options for each category, so that each category looks like its own blog. You can give read and write permissions per category, so you could make them completely distinct from each other within the same interface.

An LDAP authentication plugin also exists, I am sure it can work with OpenLDAP as well.

Best regards,
Garvin

Is there any plan for this? What exactly would it entail? If we decide to go the s9y route, I will most likely be willing to contribute towards coding this.

Any thoughts, comments or whatever else are welcome. Thanks!

[jhermanns]

hey there,

do you just have many people and many blogs connected 1:1, or do you really have some people who have multiple blogs?

in the latter case, you could either build a user/login system around serendipity, which would be less work.

you could also do a heavy patch to s9y and basically add a blogid column to each and every table (and those of plugins ) and make the necessary patches in the administration interface.

it brings more frustration, but in the end, more joy. i'd love this feature (especially for my beloved supersized.org users)...

[axelseaa]

The goal would be to authenticate users via ldap, and then allow them access to their blogs. Currently we do have users that have more than 1 blog, so a central management interface is really the most efficient way to do this.

I think this would be a great feature if its done in a way that users can still run a standalone blog (as it is now), and then have some central administration option, plugin .. or something, and then some way to manage user authentication into each blog.

I think with enough thought and research, something very cool could come fo this.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

The way I imagine is is this:

1. Add the 'blogid' column to many tables, like Jannis said.

2. Alter the s9y code to use the 'blogid' column for every query. This is the heavy patching Jannis mentioned.

3. Then I imagine the admin interface like this: A new item "Manage Blogs" would be there, which lists all the blogs (blogid) are there. You can choose to administrate one by clicking on that blog, and then the admin interface will be switched to only administrate that single blog (serendipity_Admin.php will then use blogid everywhere). So we could use the old admin interface without too much modification if we just pull through the blogid all the time. For a single-blog user then nothing would change, as the blogid defaults to '1'.
The "Manage Blogs" interface would then be able to enable specific usergroups for each blog, so that users+usergroups could be shared throughout all blogs.

However I expect this to be work for about 1-2 months full-time for a single person. I can't do it, and I must say I personally have no motivation for this since sub-categories and shared installs do everything I would ever want.

But I would LOVE the functionality to be available, because I really see how useful it could be. Of course anyone who'd like to have a go at that would have my full support and can pick my brain about things or ask for feedback on code...sadly this is all I could offer.

Best regards,
Garvin