By jasono on

Hi,

Is it possible with Drupal to create customized blogs that users apply a personalized theme onto? What I want is functionality a little similar to a typical blog (i.e. xanga) where a user can change the look and feel of the blog, either by specifying fonts and colors or by selecting from a predefined template.

Thanks,

Jason.

Comments

tatonca’s picture

tatonca commented

To my knowledge there is currently no way to do this. I wondered specifically about making the Theme choice each user has when multiple themes are enabled, persistant for that persons blog page, as an option. So for example if a user where to choose Bluemarine as thier preference, then when someone else goes to thier blog page, the page would render as Bluemarine - but just for thier blog...

I also wondered about creating a css module that could inject an internal style sheet when a users blog page was rendered, based on selections they make that overrides the .css file...

jasono’s picture

jasono commented

Been pondering about this since I posted. I think the only way to achieve this kind of functionality is to avoid using Drupal's theming capabilities at all. I think if I just use Drupal as the underlying engine for my site, then build my own GUI on top of it, I can tinker with style and themes all I want. That way, Drupal is just acting as a go-between for the GUI and the underlying database heirarchy. In order to do this, I'm going to have to really dig into the Drupal code and figure out exactly how it all works and fits together, then determine what functions need to be called for each specific page type that I have. Either way, I think this is the only method available for me to make my GUI as flexible as possible.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

http://drupal.org/project/sections

-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

daniel read’s picture

daniel read commented

I've learned that, while I did not realize it fully at the time I selected Drupal as my platform, what Drupal is good for blogging wise is "community blogging," not necessarily individual blogging where people have full control over the look and feel, or even the title, of their blogs. I think it helps if your site has a larger theme or purpose to it such that people want their blog posts to be added to the "big blog" and not just their own personal carved out blogging space. Some bloggers are looking for a community blogging situation, some are not. Community blogging is exactly what my main Drupal-base site (the developer.* Cooperative Digest) is about, so the lack of personalization works out great for me. For some blogging-related purposes, Drupal is not the best platform.

There is change happening in this area, however. There is a new module called Blogroll that allows each user to add a personal blogroll to their blog, and there is active development going on there. The same people have started a "Drupal blog personalization" mailing list that you can find from the Blogrolls module page.

HTH,
Dan

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developer.* - The Independent Magazine for Software Developers
http://www.developerdotstar.com
http://www.developerdotstar.com/community (Drupal based)

jasono’s picture

jasono commented

Ideally, it would be nice to have both though. Many users will want the ability to create a blog which is their personal homepage of sorts. Changing font families and sizes, foreground and background colors, or even adding a background image. The individual blog entries themselves should still be made available to the larger community blog, but from Drupal's perspective it shouldn't matter how this data is being presented to the user. I think that perhaps I need a greater level of abstraction between the GUI and Drupal itself. I think that what I will have to do is what I mentioned earlier: use Drupal as the underlying engine for my website, then build my own PHP pages--with whatever styles I want--that simply call functions within Drupal to pull down the required information for that page based on supplied querystring values. I'm not sure how easy this will be to code. I've just found out about Drupal, and I'm still trying to get comfortable with how it is architected, and the terminology that is used.

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

This is a big, big wish aka question... The sections module is working on that, for starters...

I'd like to get more control for theme admins to control this by adding controls to the engine that (usually) controls the theme, then maybe it could be sussed out how to pass some of those permissions onto users..

I think what would be necessary is more theme administration settings where content is arranged. One thought I had about this that I posted previously is the idea of created a weight scheme for nodes, where an admin could control the order of what appeared:
title
author
entry
categories
date

or

title
entry
date
author
categories

for example. This would give more control over to the user interface than the template file... If things could be configured like this for an engine then it stands to reason that users could have their own admin administration for their own blogs, that they could control say, the 'logo', the title, a special link block, etc. Perhaps even an 'upload css' box that allowed them to store their stylesheet on the server with their css customizations, without FTP access or third part y need. By focusing on a theme engine it would be useful for some but not add features others didn't want since they could just choose a different engine.

Those are just my thoughts, it's not really working in cohoots with sections module, so try that out, but it's just what i thought might be a possible solution...

[]+][+][+[]
erik mallinson
http://coacalina.org