Look, I really like WorPress. It is a very flexible tool that I have been able to apply to a number of diverse problems and deliver solutions that satisfy clients. All good! And as I have more individual WordPress installations to manage, some type of multi-user setup is desirable. I’d like to have one place where I run updates — one place to set permissions — one ring to rule them all! And WordPress Multi-user — MU — seems to hold the promise.
But the reality hasn’t been quite so satisfying to me. In defense of MU, it is designed to do one thing very well — and WordPress.com, powered by MU, is the primal use case. A public blog site that lets anyone establish a basic blog. Some universities, such as Wesleyan and Harvard have used MU to power their student blogs — but these uses still follow the same general use case. In this case they limit blog creation to people with university email addresses (truth — I don’t quite know how they limit these, but MU does make the email domain thing easy).
What I want to do is have control over a group of blogs — I (or defined administrators) set the users with access to the blogs. The whole farm will be limited to CASifyed users (our own, University authentication system). If a blog is set to public access any of these pre-qualified users can see it. If it is set to private only approved users can see it. Roles for individual blogs will be set by administrators. Logins to the blog will use the CAS information — it will read the user id from the SERVER setting and auto-log them into WordPress. In this case the only users who can get to a blog have already been authenticated through CAS, and we have their user_id from that, so why make the user make a second login for an individual blog.
But there is an alternate, one install-multi blog possibility. There are a number of possibilities — here are some posts, untested as of yet by me:
coderseye.com/2005/wordpress-2-multi-blogging-made-easy.html
www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-msm/
striderweb.com/nerdaphernalia/features/virtual-multiblog/o
And this one, which I started testing last winter, but never fully worked through:
www.mertner.com/allan/index.php?p=15
Look for more work in this space over the coming months on these trials AND a presentation on my work at the upcoming WordCamp-Educational Edition, February 2009 in Worcester, MA. Be there or be square!
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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