Can EE be used as a community blog site? Where there is a main page with the latest blog entries but each user has thier own home page and style/template.

Yes, it can, but it’s not very easy at the moment.  There is a community weblog module that is being worked on but no ETA.

Right now, I *think* the way people are doing this is making a group for each person and assigning that group priveledges to the particular template group/weblog that they should have.  I haven’t done this personally so not sure what other variants and methods that people have come up with. =)

this seems like a workaround for my problem.

So say if assign a seperate group for each person, will this be hard to integrate into the future community weblog module?

Hmm, what’s the ETA on that module?

Of course no sooner do I ask, I see you stated no ETA.  Doh

No ETA yet.

*dances* Sorry William.

I’m using EE for my site/stats/archieves etc but i use a 3rd party forum software for community communication.

I plan on allowing anyone to post to the weblogs but they will require to be reviewed and accepted by site admins before the messages/news/etc goes public.

what 3rd party do you use?

I really need this community plugin NOW, and am willing to pay.

can anyone help me, or even make me aware of other software /solutions?

I use Infopop’s eve.  Works nicely.  They have alot of features including a very complete user control panel and administration panels.  They will even host it for you if you need that kind of option.  It isn’t open source though which for some is a set back.  My board has over 10,000 active members on it and it functions flawlessly.  But they are not cheap.

here’s the link:
http://www.infopop.com/

There’s another forum software kit that is open source for around $300 that I hear is excellent, but I don’t remember what it is.  I’ll look around.  Also do a google search on forum software.  You should come up with some options there.

Here’s a link to the forums if you wanted to see what mine looks like in actions:  http://www.project-wildfire.com