Thread

Hello all,

Purely hypothetical question at this point. How would site licensing work if two (or more) organizations need to share the same weblog? This is something that I am presuming wouldn’t work with the Multiple Site Manager, as not just site memberships need to be shared but an actual data in a weblog, in a way more robust than just importing the info via RSS onto their respective websites.

Let’s say that there are two (or more) umbrella NGOs (non-government organizations) who serve overlapping communities (ie. they work on related issues) in the same city. They each need to publish a directory of events and volunteer opportunities organized by community members, that can be posted to by community members. 

Let’s say that each NGO has their own websites which are popular community portals, and that the main problem to work around is that they don’t want people entering their events redundantly in each site. In fact, that’s a selling point for using their respective calendars: “your event/volunteer listing will also be available on ____,” rather than just sending events around by email, which up to now, has caused a time- and money-consuming headache for everyone compiling and publishing an events calendar.

Said NGOs also care about their branding, and also don’t like to confuse people by having them bounce around sites. So there’s really no advantage in sending people to a third site called overlappingevents.com to enter and view events, especially if it looks different.

Rather, what each NGO realizes is that it makes more sense to have a site set up like overlappingevents.com, but have subdomains set up in the old “unofficial” way of multiple sites sharing data, where the user, when viewing or entering events, loads a page in the main window as ngo-a.overlappingevents.com or ngo-b.overlappingevents.com, which lists and allows posting of volunteer opportunities and events. The template pages on the subdomains share the same events/volunteering weblog, but have their own look and feel.

Also, what they like about this arrangement is that on their respective templates in their subdomains, they can present the data in the way that they want. So NGO-A can list the events as

1) - NGO-A’s events at the top
2) - Events in NGO-A’s area of emphasis
3) - “related events you might be interested in.”

NGO-B does the same thing, so its events are presented in a slightly different order. 

While not being two complete sites with different ownership hosted off of one Expression Engine installation, the complete ‘events/volunteering’ section of their respective sites are effectively hosted off of one EE installation. We’d be happy with that, not because they can “cheap out” on non-profit EE licenses, but because it would let everybody work around various logistical problems. It would in fact be easier if everyone just ran their own EE installation, but that doesn’t allow you to share weblogs.

I wonder, however, if this could be construed as some kind of “hosted blogging service,” especially if the two organizations have related organizations in nearby smaller cities that they would like to open up overlappingevents.com to. Their website person would make newsubdomains and templates that shared the look and feel of the sites the user was coming from. But, hosted blogging service-type things aren’t allowed in the EE license.

Could everyone be covered if:

a) just one installation is paid for — no need to get messy and they’re non-profits using them besides.
b) each org paid a site license as if they were hosted under the multiple site manager?
c) Or, could they be covered if they each paid for an EE non-profit/personal site license?

d) Or (shudders), is this sort of use of EE totally out of court?

While (a) would be nice, (b) and (c) would be good too, it sure would be not great if it were (d). Hoping you can tell me it’s not (d).

Thanks folks. And sorry for a horrifically long post. This is actually a scenario for two completely separate umbrella NGOs. I got asked if this could be done by each of them, in the same week!

Hm- I’ll leave the license issue for the higher ups, but the technical issues are interesting.

In truth, I’d be coming at it from a different perspective- do the two ‘sites’ need to share the same members?  Remembering of course you could have two different admin groups, one with access to some weblogs, some to others, and with some weblogs shared.

Because if the two don’t really totally share member groups?  Then I’m definitely thinking you want different installs.  And if you DO want them to share member groups, then the licensing will become the big issue to be resolved.

Because I can think of ways to enter the data once and have it go to both sites- for example, set up moblogs on both and send info that way.  You can even put a form on the frontend for sending the email- and have it go to both sites.  And with a little tweaking, you could add some dropdowns to determine IF it should go to both sites (or base that on category or whatever).  In other words- I think you could come up with different ways to enter the info once and send it off to both sites, so I’m not sure that would be the deciding factor on how I’d prefer things to work.  For me- the biggie would be the shared membership.

That make sense?

Wow. OK, looks like I’m going to have to review moblogging, which I’ve never even looked into. They don’t especially need to share members. In fact, it would be nice if site memberships weren’t even necessary for this purpose, and it worked more like Freeform, where anyone can post front-end—it’s just that site memberships seemed like a way to control spam.

The other technical issue is that orgs may have their own sites they don’t want to wrap around EE, or may not even be able to host EE. This is why handling the events database this way seemed attractive to me.

See- you can use freeform and have it send to a moblog addy- and the moblog doesn’t require membership to post that way (unless you want it to)- so…  Anyway, it’s an option worth thinking about.

Robin, can a normal PHP form on a website that is not ExpressionEngine driven post to the moblog?

And…

Let’s say we set up RSS, so each gets events back on its own website. Will clicking ‘more about this event’ (say, because the event has summary/body fields) then necessarily… have to jump to overlappingevents.com? Or is there another way to pull in weblog data to NGO-A and NGO-B?

I yi yi. I know.

Everybody who has an email address can post to the moblog, including other websites, sure.