WordPressMU add-ons and adjustments

For the last month or so we’ve been working on moving out blogs from Movable Type to WordPressMU. This has meant a lot of work on our part to get MU to meet the majority of our needs. To meet some of our needs we’ve installs several plugins. These included Role Manager, and WPMU LDAP Plugin. The Role Manager allows us to create custom roles such as owner for our blogs. This is very helpful because we want out blog owners to be able to add widgets to their blogs but not mess with Plugins or Options. Using the Role Manager we can specify exactly these permissions. The WPMU LDAP plugin is a lifesaver because it enables us to use our Active Directory accounts to login to the blogs. The best thing about this plugin is that it gets installed at the global MU level so you can configure it there once for all the blogs. Most of the other LDAP plugins we discovered had to be configured on a blog by blog basis which was very undesirable.

In addition to these plugins, some custom plugins and widgets are going to be necessary provide the functionality we need. One custom plugin I made allows us to add specific metadata about the blog to its record. Up until this point we’ve been storing this metadata separately on a different server. Putting it in WordPress keeps the blog information in a single place and helps us streamline the blog creation process.

Even with all the work we’ve done there are a few issue we still need to resolve. The biggest one is making the Web Services staff logins via LDAP global admins for all the blogs. There is a field for this in WPMU but unfortunately the WPMU LDAP plugin doesn’t allow for LDAP users to be global admins. We are getting around this right now by adding ourselves as admins to every blog (yuck!) We still need to work on migrating tags from MovableType to WordPressMU; make some adjustments to the templates; write a couple of custom widgets; and teach people the new software.

Overall though the migration process has been a success. I can’t wait for people to start using MU because I think it is tremendous improvement over Movable Type and will provide more functionality and flexibility. Kudos to my staff for their hard work on the project.