By flufftronix on

So, I know Drupal developers usually have the attitude of wanting to expand Drupal's capabilities instead of bridging to other software (or so I've read re:phpBB and Drupal), but I was curious if anyone has ever/would like to put energy into making a Wordpress MU bridge.

I love the idea of offering blogs to people who participate in the community site that I run, but really Drupal's blog module, compared to any full-form blogging software is severely lacking, and I don't forsee it catching up.

What I think would be amazing is some module/hacks to sync WordpressMU and Drupal user databases, as well as a few other simple links in between the two. (The bar that comes up on the top of the page when you're logged in to wordpress could easily contain Drupal-related links, and making a block in Drupal to post something to your blog/blogroll/etc would be fantastic, too.)

I really have an uber-minimal understanding of php and mysql (despite running open source CMS'es for 4 years now or so), or I'd do this myself. Anyone else either interested in using something like this if it were developed, or interested in developing it? Or, hell, has anyone ALREADY done this? ; )

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

atticus’s picture

atticus commented

but really Drupal's blog module, compared to any full-form blogging software is severely lacking

I'm curious what's lacking in Drupal blog capabilities. I'm not super familiar with wordpress (though I've used it and like it very much), but I've been able to put together many of the blogging features I wanted with Drupal plus modules.

Best,
Brent
Wanderings.net

eaton’s picture

eaton commented

Right now, blog.module ASSUMES that anyone posting blog entries will be doing so in a multi-user context. It also assumes, though, that ONLY 'blog post' nodes will be created in that multi-user context. It works well for simple sites, but it's the worst of both worlds for stuff that needs customizing.

It's been suggested before that 'blog.module' should really become a way of displaying a 'filtered-by-user' view of the Drupal site. That would allow any given user's "blog" on a drupal site to consist of stories, images, amazon product reviews, etc. It would also allow them to replace the 'blog post' content type with custom modules that would add other fields or custom logic.

I believe (?) that Berkes is working on such a conversion, but don't quote me on it.

--
Jeff Eaton | I heart Drupal.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

adrian’s picture

adrian commented

that organic groups is where the blog module should go.

So that you create a 'blog' (or group) node, which has all the posts related to it.

By automatically creating and associating a blog node for each user, you have the ability to have more than one blog per user, and more than one user per blog.

We also need to be able to have each site have their own base url, so that each site can appear to be a completely seperate site, but is still part of the same system.

--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

eaton’s picture

eaton commented

...But I think there's something to be said about the base_url business.

What I'd really love to see is a system that allows multiple 'sites' to cleanly share the same users and content, while using wildly different configurations, themes, etc.

It's possible to do this now with sub-paths (like www.foo.com/jeff/and www.foo.com/catherine/ sharing content but using different themes), using Berkes' excellent sections module and a number of other hacks. Doing the same under jeff.foo.com and catherine.foo.com is much, much more difficult though.

--
Jeff Eaton | I heart Drupal.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

atticus’s picture

atticus commented

Ah, I can see your point. Appreciate the perspective. Thanks!

Best,
Brent
Wanderings.net

flufftronix’s picture

flufftronix commented

To clarify here, I'm not talking about a bridge to a normal Wordpress installation, I'm talking about a bridge to Wordpress MU (look at wordpress.com for example), which manages high volumes of entirely separate blogs. Something like that might be possible in Drupal with heavy hacking, but there's really no setup for providing user-customizable blogs that look and feel independent of the main installation. I know there's a blog themes module, but this doesn't really help that much (same problem, slightly different layout!).

eaton’s picture

eaton commented

I think a better comparison might be Drupal's multisite capabilities. A single code-base can have a nearly unlimited number of sites installed... the guys from Bryght have just such a system up and running.

They don't use the same database, however.

MovableType and WordPress MU seem to all use a shared database for X number of separate sites, while Drupal tends to stick to a 'one DB per site' paradigm.

--
Jeff Eaton | I heart Drupal.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

activebiz’s picture

activebiz commented

I do have WPMU installed [although not built out yet] and need to use it since I needed to be the blog host for sites that will grow very large.

Now, the other 9 domains need to be cms and I am just now looking in to Drupal as the final choice.
Have not installed it yet because found nowhere a really definite answer to the single login question.
Drupal has such a mod but it does not seem to work properly even for Drupal themselves [I tested this last night and never was able to login in to another Drupal site].

If there would be a bridge from/to WPMU - that would be awesome. Although I am not a programmer/developer, I have become quiet familiar with hacking [lol, need to do it all the time] just to customize.

I wonder, if we could possibly hire someone for a reasonable price to write such a bridge. I would chip in.

My 2 cents worth for this subject.

Michele
where is it written that all our dreams must be small ones...

wmostrey’s picture

wmostrey commented

I'm actually trying to accomplish the same things. Reasons I do not want to use Wordpress MU:

# Each new users creates 8 new tables in the form of wp_$uid_table. That is just plain ugly.

# There is a built-in limit of 32000 blogs per install. Wordpress.com itself, which runs 230000 blogs, fixes this (post from developer on their own fora):

"There are multiple database servers, and between them the user database is split between 4096 MySQL databases. Slave servers are used to distribute reads."

That is just plain ugly.

So I'm now trying to emulate this on Drupal. There are a couple of things I'm stuck on though:
- A blog owner should be able to moderate and/or approve comments posted on his blog
- A user should be able to do a search on a specific blog, not through all the content
- There should be 1 block per block that can be managed only by the blog owner

These are the things I'm currently stuck on.. I currently have a Drupal installation with the blog, blog theme, pathauto and tinymce modules installed.

wmostrey’s picture

wmostrey commented

I tested both WPMU and Drupal with the necessary modules for about two weeks and wrote an article on my blog about it: http://mostrey.be/mu_blogging_wordpress_drupal

People wanting to skip to the conclusion:
After testing both set-ups for 2 weeks now, I'm not certain if there is a winner in this race. Wordpress offers most of the features one expects from a MU blogging application, but lacks customization and certainly a solid technical base. If you're not planning to have tens of thousands of blogs, this is certainly the way to go. If you do however, you might want to consider going through the hard work of customizing Drupal and writing your own modules.

Keeping in mind that WPMU was designed as a MU blogging application, I find it lacking the professionalism Drupal excels in. If only there is a way to cross the bridge between the two platforms. In the future, who knows..

fivenines’s picture

fivenines commented

We have a small crew of three people and we'd consider tackling this problem. Send me an email to 9 [at]fivenin.es if you are serious about this and would like to see an immediate solution. Wordpress rocks as does Drupal, but they do two entirely different things. A WP customer loves that everything in the easily installable plugins and themes, plus the ability to access so many blog specific tools that are already pre-integrated with this blogging platform. The geek in all of us love Drupal, and let's face it the join the community/registration piece is something you'd almost never do with a WP community but is de rigueur for Drupal communities. Someone wanting to offer this to a big community of users would see the benefit of both, and yes there are some substantial technical hurdles that will require some nerdy solutions (i.e programming work).

This was a post topic that I got really excited about, but like most of you wish the last post was a link to a module that already did this. The wordpress MU has it's own nuances, as does scaling Drupal with a rich interface and tons of customization given the large number of small queries and a different architecture than the several tables one blogger MU approach. It's been done, popsugar rocks. VC money and many programmers helps. You can't really compare the skins/themeing community of WP vs. Drupal, with WP there are a ton of great looking options and there are several with Drupal.

I like the Mostrey article, but like others believe that maybe the best solution lies in both. flufftronix, I like the question and your approach.

georgiawebgurl’s picture

georgiawebgurl commented

I understand the part about scalability and creating modules/blog instances using drupal, but I really do like wordpress for a few different reasons. For sites which are already running wordpress/wordpress MU, coppermine, other db installations, the issue then becomes how to migrate a whole site's worth of content to drupal and how to get users keen on drupal (wordpress is amazingly easy to use and customize on the user side).

I have one site that I work on which is just huge with many baby web editors contributing content -- mainly static html wrapped in css, with a sprinkling of wordpress MU blogs and other dbs (some proprietary). As much as I'd love to see a CMS for this site, it's not going to happen if there is no way of bridging in their existing dbs.

So, I'd love to see a bridge with wordpress MU. ;-)