How Do You MU?

One of the reasons I regret not being at the Business Blog Summit this past weekend is that it meant I wasn’t at Matt’s demo of WordPress 1.6 and WordPress.com. But I am covering the blog coverage, and reporting on the reporting, at my main blog.

In some ways, WordPress.com will be rather simular to EduBlogs. It’ll be free (although it is currently invite-only), hosted, WPMU. Typing of EduBlogs, I note that there are now over 600 of them!

After following the instructions in this post, the “broken posting buttons” problem seems to be fixed. There are icons rather than words in the buttons. In other words, posting in WP looks more like posting in most other blogging tools I’ve used. But what’s happened to my beloved blockquote button?

I should note that the above happened before I went to Options and indicated that I wanted the “visual rich editor.” Let me post this, then give that a try…

Update: things don’t seem to have got visually richer after I checked the box… 

Actually, it’s “1.6-ALPHA-2-still-dont-use” to which James has upgraded edublogs.org. At first glance, there aren’t many changes. There’s an option to use “the visual rich editor,” but I don’t see the ensuing richness.

“Presentation” shows a 250×187 image of some of the available themes. I’m not sure I like the way it works. First of all, if there are lots of images to show, it could be very slow to load. Second, clicking on an image selects that theme, where I expected that it would show a larger image.

I’m sure that there are lots of other things that I haven’t found yet…

I note that there are 400 EduBlogs! I confess that I have contributed to the growth twice as much as I perhaps should, by starting a second blog: mgtprof. I’ll post my excuse for starting a second edublog as soon as I get the password. I still haven’t received it, more than an hour after starting the blog. I don’t know whether the delay is due to edublogs, to my work email, or…

I also note that James responded “forever” to my question about the intended lifespan of edublogs.org. (See comments to the upgrade planned post.)

Thanks again, James, for EduBlogs. I promise not to start a third blog here without asking first!

So now we are 306, according the EduBlogs main page. Yet more congrats and thanks to James!

I am wondering… what is the biggest known WPMU farm? And how about the biggest WP farm using any of the other WP Multi-Blog tools?

I’m thinking about scalability, which I think is one of the keys to getting WP into organizations.

WPMU is a version of WordPress that is multi-blog, in that it allows multiple blogs from the same installation. A couple of posts ago, I blogged about multi-blog software that is not WP (and also about why I prefer the term multi-blog to multi-user).

WPMU is not the only way of making WP multi-blog. This page of the WP Codex identifies several others. It also identifies WPMU’s focus, and hence its point of differentation from the other tools described on the page. WPMU is “primarily designed to provide WordPress to users within a hosting environment.”

So far, due to restrictions in either EduBlogs or WPMU, I’ve been unable to edit the theme (although I did find one of my favorite themes among those James had uploaded) or to use plugins (unless James has installed some and I’ve been using them all along). In some ways, this has been positive. It has meant that I’ve devoted my blogging time to blogging, rather than to blog admin.

But I do there are some things that I’m used to being able to do at my main blog that I am beginning to really miss not having here. Here’s the top of my list.

• Being able to select an image with a few clicks from the Write Post screen. I use a plugin (iimage) for this.
• Having images, whether they are selected as above or linked to at Flickr or Amazon or elsewhere, be styled as I like them. I edit the theme CSS for this.
• Getting traffic stats. I use StatCounter for this, and it requires editing the template. There are also plugins that do this. It would be great if there was a plugin that provided feed stats as well, but I don’t think that there is.
• Tagging. I use Bunny’s plugin to allow me to enter tags when I post. I don’t miss this enough to have used any other method of tagging, though.

There’s now a bugs post on the EduBlogs site blog. We EduBloggers can report bugs there. James will report each bug to the appropriate developers. That’s a great help, since it saves the rest of us trying to work out whether a specific bug lies in WPMU, in WP 1.6 alpha, or is specific to EduBlogs.

Thanks again, James. I note that the number of blogs at the site is fast approaching 200. I wonder how many there will be by the end of the first week…

So the post title refers to “multi-blogger” rather than to “multi-user,” and it refers to “tools” in the plural, since WPMU is not the only such software. Thus the title refers to each of the two points I want to make in this post.

First, I don’t like “multi-user” to describe what the software we’re using here adds to WordPress. WordPress is already multi-user, in that a single blog can have multiple users (with high-level users having the authority to limit what other users can do). What WP is not is multi-blog, in that a single installation of WP supports only one blog.

The defining feature of WPMU, as I understand it, is the removal of this limitation of WP. The benefit comes in the form of system administration. One site admin (or admin team) can keep the software up to date, install plugins, and do a bunch of other things not appropriate for people who want their blogging life to be very simple.

So I think of WPMU and its competition as multi-blog software, rather than as multi-user software. Thank you for reading the preceding pedantic rant. The reward for those who did so is to get to the more interesting part of this post.

My second point relates to WPMU’s competition. Some people are making competitive comparisons, and some of these comparisons are or will be available on the web. For example, D’Arcy Norman is about to evaluate and post about three candidate platforms: WPMU, Drupal, and ELGG. The last one of these was new to me, so I had to go and create a new blog there.

Robin Good wrote a 90+ page report comparing 6 multi-blog platforms. One of the platforms was WPMU. Another was 21Publish, which paid for the comparison and for the report.

Yes, I have a blog at 21Publish also. In fact I have a blog portal, where you can if you wish join my little community of tire-kickers by setting up your own blog.

I cannot currently find Robin’s report online. I have hardcopy of a version of it dated March 28, 2005. Robin, if you read this, perhaps you could tell us the status of the report and its availability?

James reports at BlogSavvy that he’s now hosting over 100 edublogs. That’s pretty good for the first 3 days of a focused service. By the way, the main edublogs site is now itself a blog.

I’m not sure how many edubloggers share my main motivation for using the service: trying out WPMU. It’s also an opportunity to try out a new version of WP: 1.6-ALPHA-do-not-use (I-kid-you-not). Perhaps that’s why slightly weird stuff seems to be happening since I added new categories…