Family Blog

[salguod]

I use MT on my blog and have for 2.5 years. Even though the rest of the world is switching to WP, I like MT. That said, MT is not for the faint of heart. It's a powerful tool and can be overwhelming.

 

Some in my family now want to start a ;family blog' where several folks could post about what's going on adn even upload a picture or two. They want to be able to have it PW protected, so public freebie sites like blogger are out. I could doit with MT, but I wonder if it might be too much for those who are not PC or internet savvy (think Grandma).

 

I want this to be as easy and clear as possible (again, think Grandma). Are there MT plugins that could simplify things like image uploads and entry creation? Would I be better off doing this through something else like WP or ?? I'd rather use MT since I already do and I'm familiar with it, I'm just not sure its the right tool for this.

[chatbug]

Personally, I find WordPress fairly easy to use. But I guess the setting up and administration still might take a bit of skill...

 

As with password protection... I don't think if WordPress has such function, but I might be wrong. I'm fairly new to WordPress.

 

I think for MSN spaces, you can set to visible only to people you specify... but then, you'll be hosted by Microsoft instead of on your own server.

 

My 2 cents... cheers!

[TCH-Bruce]

You can write posts to Wordpress using Email if you wanted. So if your grandmother knows how to write an email she would know how to post. You just set up a special email account for Wordpress and any email sent to that address becomes a post. I do not think you can attach images to it though.

 

In Wordpress if you use registration you can set posts so that only people with the level you set them at can view the content.

 

You can also password protect posts in Wordpress.

[TCH-Tim]

For posting images vie email check out Flickr. Set up a regular Flickr account, put in your blog settings (supports most of them), and it gives you an email address you can use to post to your blog. You write an email and attach the image - the subject is the title of the post, the body text is the body of the post, and the attached image is placed in the post however you defined when you set up the account. Grandma should definitely be able to handle that, assuming you do all the setup for her.

 

The only problem I see with it is that the post gets put up on Flickr as well. You can go and make it private after the fact, but I haven't figured out how to make it private by default. Maybe there's a Flickr guru in the bunch.

[TCH-Tim]

Also, check out WordPress MU. Haven't tried it myself yet, but I was thinking about trying to set it up for my family so I can get them off Blogger, LiveJournal, etc.

[marie b.]

Making Flickr photos private by default : http://www.flickr.com/help/privacy/

[salguod]

The flickr thing sounds promising, especially since it will let me keep MT. I'm not apposed to WP, I'm just familiar with MT.

 

I definitely don't want to maintain two different packages if I can help it. Having the family blog on WP and mine on MT could get confusing, at least for me.

 

Thanks, and if there are more ideas, let me know!

[abinidi]

I have a blog set up for my brother using WordPress. It utilizes 2 plugins: Role Manager 1.4.4 and Registered Only.

 

With the Registered Only plugin, whenever anybody hits his main blog page, you get redirected to the login page. You can't view ANY content until you are authenticated.

 

With the Role Manager plugin, I get to assign specific roles and capabilities to individual users. That lets me have some fine-grained control over who can access the system and how they access it.

 

The Reigistered Only plugin has been great. He is in politics, but wishes to keep a private blog for family and friends.

 

Something similar could be useful for your family.

[salguod]

With MT, I can give different users differnt rights out of the box. I can restrict their rights on posting, editing, managing categories, system config, weblog config, what weblogs they can access and more. Does it take a plugin in WP to do that?

 

I plan on doing the rights by placing the weblog files in a password protected folder and creating a robots.txt file to tell search engines to not index the folder. I'm pretty sure that there is a plugin that will password protect through MT, but the folder level seems easier.

[abinidi]

No, the plugin isn't required for the basics. WP includes some default categories (Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor, Subscriber), but these roles have default functionalities that you can't change without a plugin.

 

The Role Manager plugin lets you modify these default behaviors, as well as add new roles and gives you compelete control over what each role can do.

 

All from the WP interface. It's pretty slick.

 

I have to say that one of the things I liked most about WP (especially with the 1.5 code base) was that there WEREN'T a lot of bells and whistles built in, but the code allows you to create them (or add them as plugins). So you can build the blog you want with the features you want instead of being required to have a bunch of features that you don't use but still require disk space and processing overhead.

 

It's the same principle about what I like about Firefox. I download just a plain ol' browser. Then I figure out what I want my browser to do in addition, and I install the plugins (or, in Firefox, "extensions") that accomplish that task.

 

I don't want a bunch of features that I'm not going to use. But I want to be able to add the features that I want.