[FREE] Blog for every user

[desai_amogh]

Version: SMF 2.0.7

Description:
SMF forums are largely used for discussions and for helping fellow members.  A lot of users dedicatedly follow some forums of their choice for years.  Some create Guides, DIY articles, How-Tos and such.  At times these articles could pileup to 1000s for few users.  That's a lot of content going un-noticed. 

What I propose is to create a feature so that every User (registered) can have a blog page for himself on SMF.  His profile page can be Little more attractive with more information (like in social networks) and a dedicated Blog page for every user (e.g www.domain.com/username).

Permissions:  Registered Users

Feature Set:

• Blog Page for every user, (e.g www.domain.com/username).
• Progile page with more details, like Bio, interests, etc
• Profile page should have latest Blog Posts by User
• User can select Forum posts/topics created by him to be shown as blog posts
• Option to show Recent blog posts (by all the users) on Forum's main page
• Dedicated Blog page (e.g www.domain.com/blogs).
• User info on forum topics and posts should have link to User's blog
• Signature should have blog link
• Admin can choose which groups can blog

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[Arantor]

There are already mods for users to create their own blogs. Doing the friendly URL style you're asking for is a *lot* more technical, though. Most of the rest is already doable with existing mods with a little work.

What I will note is that in *practice* having observed this sort of thing, you could give every member of a site the potential for a blog and most of them will not use it.

[live627]

Doing the friendly URL style you're asking for is a *lot* more technical

And here is where a proper routing system would come in.

[Arantor]

Doing the friendly URL style you're asking for is a *lot* more technical

And here is where a proper routing system would come in.

Well, one could make the argument, albeit from a defensive position, that it does have a routing system since technically the action= stuff is a form of router. It's certainly better than the webserver-as-router solution seen in MyBB and older vBulletin.

What is needed is a unified router and link builder, ideally with a flattened and RESTful link basis. This is a scary amount of work to implement in SMF since it means tearing out so much of how SMF actually works to make it work. But once done you could implement this sort of thing without too much fuss, along with route rerouting, e.g. being able to let a portal add action=forum and then rewrite that on the fly to action=foro or whatever else the language of the forum would normally want. Or whatever URL scheme you end up with.

Or you could just suck it up and bastardise something like Pretty URLs because it's perfectly acceptable to rewrite everything in the buffer at the last minute. Obviously. (sarcasm)

[Arantor]

Also, reposting a topic from a few weeks ago isn't going to help your case either.

[Biology Forums]

This topic comes up way too much... I think a website admin should only think about this once a large number of members have signed up.