How Do You MU?

Many users of the web suffer from Multiple Identity Disorder, since they use multiple web services, at each of which they have a username/password and a profile. OpenID is a means of treating MID.

WordPress.com recently became an OpenID producer. Here’s the announcement post. Here’s one of my posts on the news, and here’s another. Here’s the WordPress.com FAQ on OpenID.

And, to finally get to the part that’s relevant to WPMU:we’re going to release the MU plugin, says Matt.

I’ve only just noticed that the WordPress Codex now includes a page about WPMU. This is yet another sign of WPMU’s importance to WordPress. Maybe I will edit the page to link to this blog…

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…

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.”

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…