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Multi User DasBlog Prototype

I’ve put together a prototype of a multi user version of DasBlog. You can see two “users” at http://www-dev.redyawning.com/hyperionab/ and http://www-dev.redyawning.com/foobar/. Both of those two users hit a different set of content files as well as a different set of SiteConfigs and logs but run in the same application space. The basic way I have it working is:

  1. HttpHandler called MultiUserHandler intercepts each HTTP request and puts two items in the HttpContext.Current.Cache: MultiUserOriginalUrl and MultiUserCacheMap. The first one is the URL that is seen by the handler and the second one is the username deconstructed off of the query string (e.g. “hyperionab”).
  2. MultiUserHandler then does a HttpContext.RewriteUrl (I can’t remember exactly the namespaces since it was pretty late last night that I was doing all this) by rewriting the URL to take off the username.
  3. SiteConfig.GetSiteConfig prepends MultiUserCacheMap to all the times a config/content/log file is read up from the file system
  4. MultiUserOriginalUrl is used whenever DasBlog is constructing a URL instead of the Page.Url variable (since it’s been masked a long time ago in the page execution by the RewriteUrl call)

My current directory structure at the root is:

  • /content
  • /logs
  • /SiteConfig
  • /hyperionab/
    • content
    • logs
    • SiteConfig
  • /foobar/
    • content
    • logs
    • SiteConfig
  • *.aspx
  • *.aspx.cs
  • etc

The top level content/logs/config directories store the root level blog data and each of the “user”name’ed directories store the set for each of them. I’m not quite sure that’s exactly how I want to do it acutally. It might make more sense to have each user directory within the master content directory:

  • /content/
    • hyperionab
    • foobar
  • /logs/
    • hyperionab
    • foobar
  • /siteconfig
    • hyperionab
    • foobar

I guess at that point, it’s just a matter of style. I also don’t have security working yet, so you can’t log in to each of the blogs. My feeling on site security and the usernames is that the siteSecurity.config file should be merged/unified for all sub-blogs and the users in the config file would have a mapping to which blog they can edit. The siteSecurity.config file would serve as the master list of the users. That would make it useful for people who want to maintain multiple blogs per blog hosting site but keep the same username.

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