Wordpress MU: The blog hosting software king

Hi all,

I was recently brought on to blog over at Blog Duck, and my first post was about Wordpress MU. I'll post the first bit here, and if you find it interesting you can click over to the full article.

Disclaimer: While I did write the article, I have no financial interest in the site. There for, I think it's justified to throw out the shameless plug.

--------------------------------
Wordpress MU: The blog hosting software king

I had a heck of a time deciding what to post about for my maiden post here at Blog Duck. I tossed back and forth between several ideas, and finally decided to settle on a post about Wordpress MU. I plan on focusing more in individual blogging moving forward, but I’ve seen some questions pop up throughout the web regarding Wordpress MU, and because I’ve just come out of a two week crash course with the software, I figured I would write about it while it’s fresh on my mind.

A few weeks back, I had a lengthy phone conversation with Lorelle VanFossen, author of Blogging Tips and arguably one the most talented Wordpress bloggers known today. Our conversation took us into the discussion of blog hosting, which is one of my business ventures. I mentioned to her that I was considering a move to Wordpress MU, as my current hosting site was running blogs in directories and it was a beast of an amount of work to maintain.

The way I was running the site goes a little something like... read the rest

-------------------

How many DP'ers use WPMU? Anyone?

 

Great article!

I'm planning on using Mu at some point, and I've only seen a few opinions on it so far. Yours was the most in depth I've read

 

Thanks! I could have gone a bit deeper into it with the pros, but I didn't want to drift off into that never ending abyss of goodness, which I could have stayed in for hours.

You'll love WPMU. It's a lot of fun and a great chunk of software.

 

wpmu is great, its easy to customize (especially if you are familiar with wordpress - it uses pretty much the same templating system), also has a few great plugins available at wpmudev.org (plus most standard wp plugins/themes work for it too.

 

Not using it yet but have intended to for a while ... thanks for the reminder

 

I'm currently using it... it's an amazing system, but it still needs to support different domains without using hack/fixes.

 

Last time i used WPMU (almost a year ago) it was letting members edit their templates so it wasn't possible for the Admin to put his own Adsense on clients pages

is it still the case ?

Great script indeed

 

I don't think this is the case anymore.

 

thanks zman!

before i heard wpmu, i had the similar idea as you - to install wp for each user and grant them ftp access. i even create some script to create soft link to share one theme and plugin folder for each blog. but after i heard wpmu, i found a way better life from it.

are you going to roll out your wpmu blogging site soon? what plugin will you use? please be advised that wp plugin doesnt really automatically work for wpmu.

 

We're already live.

http://www.blogaught.com

 

zman, ur site is cool! one suggestion is that you can even replace the default mu .ico thingy on the address bar...

do you have a list of the individual blog? if not, how about a demo blog which show stranger like me some functionalities?

thanks in advanced!

 

have a look at http://blogaught.com/blog/

 

I don't accept it as king because it has alot of bugs still now and wordpress not giving full attention to it like they do on normal script this script should be in beta.

 

When I was looking for a Multi user blogging platform I found that WPMU was a piece of cr@p - and when I looked at lit a little while ago it was not much better.

When I agree WP (for a single user) is probably the best blogging platform, when it comes to a Multi-user environment there are blogging platforms that are much better!

My personal choice for a multi-user blog platform is Lifetype. It is software that has active development (6 releases within the last year), plenty of plugins and addond, plenty of templates etc. The admin interface is pretty good and very easy to use and takes only a few minutes to understand.

The main reason I chose Lifetype was that the install process was simple and everything worked as described right out of the box. I spent a few days trying to get WPMU working properly and gave up on it as a bad joke. But, if it works for you then good luck!

 

Does anyone know of an 'idiots guide' to installation? I have been looking at this for over 2 years for an idea of mine, I tried a few times but failed miserably.

Maybe its time try again.

 

This is the reason I gave WPMU the flick and made lifetype my platform of choice.

 

Because you fail at getting it to work does not make the software any less valuable or worthy.

 

Well, it seems from posts here that I am not the only one who has trouble getting it working.

Please refer back to my previous post -

Your article was quite good at explaining the software and extolling it's virtues, I simply offered an alternative set of choices.

Now when all is said and done, it does not matter how good WPMU actually might be if people have trouble getting it working in the first place to use it. It SEEMS that when someone manages to make it work then it is a great solution - I simply offered that I spent a lot of time on it and couldn't get it going and found an alternative that Works for me.