I want to run a Wordpress site, where users can sign up and publish their own blog/journals. Its for a niche hobby, where each user can sign up, and start sharing their experiences and updates they do with their hobby.
My initial plan is to have a main front page feed with updates from all uses, but also a page for each user to group their posts. Also options to follow each user and intergration to ActivityPub.
How would you suggest I did this? Do I need any plug in, or would a vanilla installation work fine for it?
You can use the builtin WordPress multisite functionality for this: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/wordpress-glossary/#multisite
This is basically what WordPress.com used in the beginning, and is pretty much exactly what @OP is describing
I had a look at it but it seems like i manually need to create a blog for the users who want one right?
I was looking for an automated process where users could simply sign up and start blogging. Even share the same categories but maybe desperate media library
Maybe i am just looking at letting users just be authors?
Would they have their own page with own posts?
@cosmicrookie @jqubed this can be achieve but there are few ways to troubleshoot it
Registration is disabled by default, but can be enabled. You’ll want to read through the entire Multisite section, but that documentation is relatively sparse; it looks like there’s an assumption that someone doing this is already an experienced WordPress administrator and has broader website administration experience. Everything you’re describing can be done with this system (except possibly giving everyone the same categories to start but your users can create their own categories, and you could probably create a plugin to give them the categories you want at the start).
However, this is really complex stuff by WordPress standards and requires you configuring things outside of WordPress directly on the server itself, in cPanel, DNS, etc. If you allow automated registration you’ll also need to be prepared to support your less-technical users and also have plans to deal with them posting spam or illegal content. This is all non-trivial stuff and if you’re not quickly grasping what the documentation discusses you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into learning it on your own before you start or hiring someone who has these skills. There will be very little support available to you from the WordPress support team because outside of WordPress.com (the commercial, for-profit entity you’d technically be competing against) almost no one uses this feature, and my understanding (from 6 or 7 years ago) is even WordPress.com has been moving their paid users away from it.
I wonder if what I am looking for is simply letting people sign up as authors.
What I am looking for, is a way to let people publish journals of their hobby. For examble lets say the hobby is plant keeping. I’d like them to sign up, and have a space where they can share what plants they have just bought, progress with certain plant propagation, maybe casual updates etc.
From the hobby that I am in, some offer this in forums, but it does not really work that well, because updates get mixed with comments.
So what I had hopped to achieve was a front page with a feed from everyone, as well as a dedicated page for each author, where their posts feed is shown (preferably with an optional filter for categories and types of posts)
You could do it that way; I think the only drawback would be that everyone would have access to everyone else’s media uploads, but there may be a way to adjust permissions so that someone in an author role would only have access to media they’ve uploaded. I haven’t looked at that in a long time but that sort of seems like that was an option, or certainly could be a plugin.
I’m not sure if there’s a default way to let people sign up as authors, but from a spam-prevention perspective it might be better to let people sign up as commenters and then request their accounts be promoted to authors; I wouldn’t imagine an automated WordPress spam bot would ever understand that it could request promotion to author, so anyone who asks is probably human.
Overall that’s probably going to be a simpler method, just needing some relatively minor tweaks from a typical Wordpress installation.