Wordpress MU
Oct 18th, 2006 by Karen
So I spent some time today playing with Wordpress MU because I wanted to try it out and see how it compared with Movable Type as a multi-blog, multi-user blogging environment. We’ve been using Movable Type for blogging for the last year but for a number of different reasons (the biggest being we don’t have a Perl coder and Movable Type is written in Perl) I’m considering moving us to a different system.
First off I want to say that Wordpress MU is a snap to install. It tells you if you have the proper Apache modules and if your files are permissioned correctly or not. Once I got it installed and played around. My first impressions were "Wow what a nice tool". Honestly I didn’t expect that Wordpress MU would be up to the task, but in truth all the functionality is there.
The biggest issue I had was figuring out where the global administration settings lived. Another interesting thing in Wordpress MU is that the "Presentation" screen and features are completely different. There doesn’t seem to be a web tool for editing themes in Wordpress MU. Only a tool that let’s you change certain parts of the theme. This is both a plus and a minus for me. It is a plus because I want all the Libraries blogs to look the same. But a minus because to create a theme for the Libraries’ blogs my staff and I are going to have to download files edit them and reupload them. I also want to give blog owners some flexibility about what displays in the side navigation of their blog.
At the moment, I’m still testing to see how to make things work the way I want. For example, I want blog owners to be able to govern the users attached to their blogs but not change how the blog is presented. I think that some of my problems may be answered by installing plugins but I haven’t gotten that far yet. More on this at a later date (ie most Internet Librarian).
Have you taken a look at Lyceum? It’s very similar to WPMU, but from a somewhat different angle. You might find it meets your needs better.
I’ve been using WordPress MU and have been very impressed by it as well. I also learned (somewhere along the way) the secret to editing themes in it.
There is a file
/wp-admin/theme-editor.php
that has a little php block at the front of it (in the code). Once you remove that you can reference this file from your wordpress install even though there isn’t a link to it from the blogging software itself. Once you do this you can edit your themes, no problem.
I looked at Lyceum too but decided on WP-MU because all the hosted blogs are kept in separate tables (unlike Lyceum). Since both are fledgling attempts, I felt a little better about getting my data back out if it was distinct. Lyceum at least last time I checked put all the blog data in one table structure.
I’ll second Lyceum…I’ve played with it a few times, and it’s a solid product. It also helps that I know some of the developers at ibiblio.
So if you were running a hosting business, would this be a way to offer blogs to many people at once without having to deal with 50 different installs of wordpress?
Blake — yep, very likely. Last I checked, Lyceum didn’t handle subdomains well, but could be hacked slightly to do so.
The hard part is moving individual blogs over, I think. If you give that a whirl, PLEASE post about your process!
Blake — WordPress MU does me.domain.edu, you.domain.edu, frank.domain.edu, etc. Once you set one up it is relatively easy to import an existing blog into the newly set up one. I’ve thought about this for combining litablog and acrlblog and then using mod_proxy to keep the litablog.org and acrlblog.org domains (oh, to manage only one wp install).
What a dork am I! I thought the MU option only existed as a hosted app. I was about to install b2evolution because I was getting kinda tired of recoding all these WP pieces to force it to handle multiuser ;)
BTW, I do recode all the public-facing bits to use a different filename extension and folder names than standard WP. Our site gets such a ton of would-be spammers/crackers trying to post or attack using standard blog file locations.
Yeah, I’ve thought about using it to give specific blogs we have their own hostname. So instructioblog.lib.uh.edu and specialcollectionsblog.lib.uh.edu . My understanding of the Wordpress.org site (which does blog hosting) is that it is based on Wordpress MU, which has been further modified. Right now I believe all the blogs there are on the wordpress.org domain but with their own hostname.
We’re trying out MU at our office… it is true that it is set up to publish blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, blog3.yourdomain.com — but you can use a DNS CNAME entry to make those subdomains equal http://www.someotherdomain.com