I’m planning to build a blog site for a large programming community. I think that MT Pro with the community add-ons will do what I want, but I’d appreciate it if you could look over the brief list of requirements below and let me know if I’m going to run into problems.
Things I need:
A blog per member - automatically created when people sign up, but it would be nice if the site admins could approve new membership requests.
A front page which consists of the latest posts from all of the blogs.
It would also be nice if we could bar users from adding Javascript in entries as the site is going to live on a subdomain of a well-known existing domain, and the owners of that domain are wary of JS being used for XSS attacks against their domain.
If anyone has any war stories to share about building a site like that, then I’d love to hear them.
Thanks,
Dave…
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
Automatic Blog Provisioning for New Users.
The front page needs nothing more than an mt:Entries tag with multi-blog attributes.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't it also be a good idea to model the new user for these blogs as a user without administrative control over their blog, so that they cannot modify the templates that way?
Mike,
Absolutely. That's certainly what we're planning to do.
But I already knew how to do that, so I didn't include it in my question :-)
Su, thanks for the suggestions.
The multi-blog attributes look really useful. I'll take a closer look at those.
I've trying to use the automatic blog provisioning, but it doesn't seem to work. I've set up the configuration options as described in the documentation that you link to, but no blogs get created when a new user is set up.
Is there something missing from that documentation?
Actually, I just ran across this bug in the tracker, in which provisioning is broken in 4.23 when the user registers from the front end. Sounds like it's probably what you're seeing, though you haven't mentioned exactly what version you're currently on. Might be worth a look. Seems it's been fixed for the next Motion beta, by the way.
Ah, yes. That looks like the problem. I'll keep an eye on that bug.
Thanks,
Dave...
The MT::App::CMS package has a callback called CMSPreSave.entry that should be useful for you. If you add a callback method to it, you can get access to the MT::Entry object that represents a new, incoming blog post and strip it of any <script> tags.
Mike,
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll certainly take a look.