Hi, I've been working on a plan for campus-wide blogging at USC using Drupal and am hoping to get some feedback, especially on the technical implementation side. Plan, documentation: https://w3.usc.edu/display/blogs/Home Clickable partial wires: http://w3.usc.edu/blogs/site/ I'm working from the latest Drupal 4.6.0 release (am keeping a separate svn vendor branch, as I think some core modifications will be unavoidable) The focus for the blogging functionality are: * formal and ad-hoc group forming - I think this will be done primarily through the organic groups module * fine-grained, layered, per-entry privacy control - throwing an interface on top of the by-node privacy * emergent taxonomies (freetags) - looking at Julian's Folksonomy as well as the new 4.6 Folksonomy module I'm not sure how roles plays with all this yet, I think since a lot of the control I'm looking at is group-based rather than traditional roles, I may just skip that entirely? Here are the issues I'm encountering so far that I'm hoping to get suggestions on: * webserver_auth - I'm kicking the wheels on the webserver_auth module (http://drupal.org/project/webserver_auth) right now (we use Shibboleth for our WebISO/SSO, but it's basically a form of Apache authentication). There seems to be an issue with how it processes the REMOTE_USER though. Can someone point me to docs or explain how the authmap works w/ the external user calls? I don't mind just hacking in there, but if possible, I'd like to do things the 'right way'. * first-login - is there a first-login module? basically, we need to create a step-by-step process for when users first sign-in: http://w3.usc.edu/blogs/site/Step%201.html * theming - this is perhaps a biggie. Drupal currently seems to work on a per-user basis for theme selection. We're looking to allow users to choose their own themes for their own blogs, that will apply on a per blog/space basis (and in the future customize w/ coloring, images): http://w3.usc.edu/blogs/site/My%20Blog.html Any suggestions? Are we going to have to write (adapt) our own theme engine? * friends view - one of the other big pieces is a creating a personal aggregator view (http://w3.usc.edu/blogs/site/My%20Favorites.html), sort of like a mega-livejournal/y!360 friends view. Is there anything out there that does this? * blog view - I've seen some earlier posts about adapting the 'blog' view to handle all types of content types. We're definitely interested in doing that. Any thoughts beyond the hacks that people have done already? * aggregation - one of the things we're trying to do is have a graceful way of handling users who already have their own blogs. I'm looking into the idea of using the rss aggregation solely for importing a user's external blogs into nodes for a user (see blog view for displaying all content types by a user) * major changes to input forms - I don't think there's any other options besides hacking away at the node and filter modules? * Dashboard - the main page view, once logged in and first-logged in'd, is for a Dashboard - does something like this exist? in the past, I've hacked things directly into the theme templates, but the 'right' way to do it is through a module (and then change the front-page setting from node to dashboard?) A lot of functionality is there, I think a fair bit of this is wrapping my head around the best way to implement within Drupal. As mentioned, any feedback, suggestions, pointers would be appreciated. (should I also post to the forums, or is that redundant?) .l