A dear friend has passed away, and we want to create a site where her worldwide circle of friends can post stories and reminiscences about her life.
So, I'm wondering if it's possible to use MT to create an open blog. Like, *way* open. My requirements:
1. Any visitor to the site can post a story, via a simple HTML form. No username or password, no navigating the MT interface. Basically, it would feel like posting a comment.
2. Ideally, the story could have a title, and the user could include their name, email address, and/or Web address as separate data fields. Again, just like posting a comment (except with a title!).
3. The story gets added to the site as a full-fledged blog entry, with all the associated MT-related benefits: each story gets its own page, archiving, comments attached to the blog entry, etc.
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Is there any way to achieve this? Looking through the available plugins, a few approaches come to mind:
- Turn the user's post into an email, then use Pop2Blog or MEOW to convert the email into a blog entry. This seems doable, but a bit kludgey (and might require a cron job, which makes me a bit nervous).
- Beef up comment functionality somehow. (Maybe using MTEntryIfComments?) Not sure how this would translate into a full-fledged blog entry, though.
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Assuming this open-blog thing is achievable, there are the spam and security issues to worry about.
- Spam: I'm willing to accept the risk here -- keeping a low profile, deleting spams individually, etc. Is this naive?
- Security: This I'm a bit more worried about. Am I opening myself up to huge security risks by letting the world run rampant on my server? What steps could I take to sufficiently protect myself?
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Note: I'm not a Perl or PHP programmer, so creating custom plugins is beyond my skills at this point.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Peace,
Andrew Chaikin, aka Kid Beyond
http://biggerbread.com | http://kidbeyond.com