How Do You MU?

Tom of Salzburg weblogs asked for an RSS feed of the list of WPMU hosts that I maintain in the sidebar of this blog. I set up a feed in the quickest way I know how. I went down the list, visiting each host in turn, and del.icio.us-tagging each with wpmu and host.

So you can see the delicious version of the list, and subscribe to its RSS feed. The only tags I’ve used, besides wpmu and host, indicate the language for non-English blogs. There are two of them: Salzburg (in German, although not in Germany) and Chile (in Spanish, although not in Spain.

The way in which I’ve done this is the quickest, but probably not the best. It’s probably a good job for OPML, but I find the OPML tool rather counter-intuitive.

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.

So, having moved in, I want to decorate. I’ve changed the theme away from the default to Almost Spring, a wonderful award-winning theme that was one of about a dozen themes pre-installed by my kind host. I note that I can add more themes to the menu in the usual way, and I will probably do so.

Now, what about plugins. I don’t see Plugins listed on the management menu. I wonder why this is? Three possible answers occur to me.

• WPMU doesn’t allow them to be set on a blog-by-blog basis.
• WPMU allows it, but edublogs.org doesn’t.
• Plugin management is among the menus, but not in the place I’m used to.

I hope that plugin management is available. I can’t make this “my” WP blog without it.

Update, thanks to responses at a plugins thread in the WPMU forum by the now-blogrolled WPMU developer Donccha. Blog admins will “never” be able to upload their own plugins; that’s for site admin to do. However, it will “probably” be possible in the future for plugins to be (de)activated on a blog-by-blog basis.

I am a serial blogger, have tried many blogging tools, and currently favor WordPress. I’ve been meaning to try WP MU (multi-user) for a while, and this seems like as good an opportunity as any. Thanks to edublogs for hosting.