Multi-Blog Alternative?

[Brock Nanson <bnanson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Good Morning,

I should start by saying that, yes, I could install and configure and 
test and modify and try to work this out for myself, but I don't really 
want to spend a great deal of time on a dead end!  Hopefully someone can 
answer 'yes' or 'no' instead.

I'm in an engineering firm.  We have dozens of projects on the server 
that see active and somewhat active use.  We're based on AutoDesk Land 
Desktop, which creates these project folders and does a good job of 
organizing things.  What I want to do is add an Intranet 'blog' to each 
of these projects that will allow users to add notations viewable by 
others, EASILY.  These comments could be anything from 'gov't agency X 
contact is Joe Blow' to 'the topo survey from Y is totally fsck'd, use 
with caution'.  The trick is it has to be easy to use.  Project folders 
are named by the job number.

I've looked at blog software (greymatter comes to mind), but they seem 
to want to run an instance of the scripts for each weblog.  That's a 
maintenance nightmare I'd prefer to avoid.  I need something that's 
scalable.

I had the brainwave that I might be able to adapt an email to html 
conversion program to do this instead.  So what I'd do is:

- email to 'blog@xxxxxxxxxxxx', subject: <jobnumber><actual subject>, 
content: <Actual Content>
- we use IMAP and maildir's, so this would end up in blog's maildir 
folder as a single file.
- run mhonarc or similar at regular intervals to parse through the 
maildir and check for new messages.  If found:
   - extract job number from the subject (this will determine the html 
file to which message will be added)
   - append actual subject and content to the page.
   - ideally, delete the message when html conversion is complete.

It would be nice to put the html page in the actual project folder 
structure somewhere, so it gets archived with the project when 
complete.  But I *could* put all the blogs in a single folder somewhere 
and create symlinks from the projects.

Is this something that mhonarc could be adapted to do?  Easily, or is 
this a weeks work for a programmer?  Is there something else out there 
that would do this 'out of the box'?

Any hints would be appreciated!

--
Brock Nanson