Publisher review:BlogHoster is a PHP-based software product which allows you to provide a blog hosting service on your website. BlogHoster is a PHP-based software product which allows you to provide a blog hosting service on your website.
The blog hosting that you give your users with BlogHoster is comparable to popular third-party blog hosting services like Blogger, Livejournal, and Typepad.
As the admin of your blog hosting service, you can control how users will signup, write in their blogs, and interact with each other. The entire visual frontend of the software is generic, so you can easily give it your website's look and feel. You can even have ads automatically inserted on your users' weblogs.
BlogHoster also includes a variety of social-networking features, including interactive profiles, photo albums, friendships, blog categories, and more.
Features Overview
BlogHoster is the first true multi-user blog hosting platform. In developing the product, we focused on creating a system that would host numerous blogs while connecting their authors with profiles, friendships, and other social networking features. This capacity for "viral growth" is what makes BlogHoster stand far above other blog hosting platforms.
Customizability - Unencoded Source - BlogHoster's source code is completely unencoded. This means that you, the administrator, have the ability to modify every aspect of your system. Many BlogHoster administrators have customized their installation to match the unique themes of their websites.
Easy Website Integration - Unlike other blog hosting systems, BlogHoster is exceptionally easy to integrate into your existing website design. With the BlogHoster admin panel, you can easily insert an HTML header and footer to wrap around the BlogHoster content. You can also specify a different HTML header and footer for the internal BlogHoster pages (including the users' blog manager). The CSS styles are also included in the HTML template, so changing the look and feel of your blog hosting service is simple!
Example Portal Pages - Several example portal pages are included with BlogHoster to help you build your own blog community from the ground up. Custom Profile Fields - As the admin, you can create custom profile fields that match the theme of your blog network. For example, if you are running a dating-themed service and want users to describe themselves, you can create fields such as height, weight, hair color, etc. Interactivity & Social Networking
- Friendships - Users can list each other as friends, and display their friend lists on their profiles. Users can also give their friends special privileges, like access to their private blogs.
- Private Messages - Users can send each other private messages, which they can read from their message inbox.
- Friends Page - Users blogs may include a "friends' recent entries" page, which displays the recent blog entries posted by that user's friends.
- Browse Users - Users can use the "browse" page to browse all the users on your blog network. This can be filtered by information such as location, age, gender, interest, etc.
- Interest Keywords - If you wish, you can have keywords on your users' profile pages linked to browse results filtered by those keywords.
- Search Users - Users can search for other users based on their profile information. You, the admin, have control over which profile fields users can search with.
- Extendibility - BlogHoster's database structure is simple and mostly self-explainatory, so with some basic PHP knowledge you can create scripts that display the most recent user signups, entries, comments, etc., and display them on other parts of your website.
- Mailing Lists - If enabled, users can create mailing lists for their blogs. This is a list of email addresses that are notified each time a new entry is posted.
- Avatars - Users can upload small photos of themselves, which appear on the blog, profile, and next to their username in search/browse results.
Media Features
- Photo Albums - If enabled, each user can upload photos to their own photo album, which is linked from their blogs and their profiles. Photos can be given titles and descriptions, and thumbnails are automatically generated for easy browsing.
- Podcasts - If enabled, users can upload MP3 or other audio files to a special folder in their file manager. They can easily podcast these files by clicking a single link and writing a blog entry.
- Other Files - If enabled, users can create other file folders to upload and store files with other formats. You, the admin, can decide what formats are allowed and how much space your users will get.
Profitable Features
- Advertisement Insertion - As the admin, you can automatically insert any HTML, Flash, or Javascript at the top or bottom of your users' blogs. This is an excellent way to generate advertising revenue from your traffic.
- PayPal Integration - PayPal is integrated with BlogHoster so that you can charge users for their accounts. It is possible to charge them a single fee for signing up, or recurring fees in weekly, monthly, or yearly periods with all the currencies accepted by PayPal.
- User Groups - You can create user groups to limit the features your users get. For example, your first user group may be called "Free Accounts" and give users the ability to have only 1 blog, 2MB of space for photos, and 10 blog templates. Your second user group may be called "Paid Accounts" and give users the ability to have 5 blogs, 10MB of space, 25 blog templates, and other additional features. Your users can then upgrade from their free accounts to a paid account automatically using the integrated PayPal payment gateway. You can create an unlimited number of user groups.
Changes in Version 2.7:
- Added the ability to resize uploaded images, both upon upload and to existing images, based on a percentage.
- Made templates consistent across comments, photo albums etc, which required the replacing of the tag in album.php, friends.php, archive.php, delete_comments.php, edit_comments.phps, previewcomment.php, preview.php, previewentry.php. Updated profile.php to replace in template code.
- Added various missing tags to the user end Tags and Templates Guide.
- Bug Fix: Fixed the problem with some server configs and uploading photos (safe_mode related issue).
- Bug Fix: Fixed problem with emails not sending line breaks for email notifications of new comments.
- Bug Fix: Emails being sent by the system did not always obey page breaks. Adding the relevant HTML to your email content will now be obeyed.
- Comments can now be posted within the user template, rather than the template defaulting to the default template for the system.
- Photo Album pages now use the user template, rather than defaulting to the default system template.
- Profiles now keep the user template rather than defaulting to the default system template.
- Bug Fix: "Remember me" option on user login is now fixed.
- Admin can now manually set a user to "verified" status via the admin control panel.
- Bug Fix: Fixed problem some server configs experienced with posting comments by adding to the relevant database table.
- Bug Fix: Fixed a symbol rendering problem with the template "Best Friend".
- Bug Fix: Fixed the undefined variable errors some users got in manager_header.php
- Added the ability for the weblog name to be listed in the title bar of the blog when viewed in a browser.
BlogHoster 2.7 is a PHP script for Blog scripts design by Webligo Developments.
It runs on following operating system: Windows / Linux / Mac OS / BSD / Solaris.
BlogHoster is a PHP-based software product which allows you to provide a blog hosting service on your website.
Operating system:Windows / Linux / Mac OS / BSD / Solaris
BlogHoster 2.7 script details 
