Plymouth State Looks At Wordpress MU

// September 8th, 2005 // Technology Bits

Plymouth State University’s IT department has relied heavily on PHP for web-based applications for a lot of years now. We employ multiple PHP developers and get really excited about well written PHP apps.

Recently a lot of us (see links in right nav) have been using Wordpress for blogging. It’s code and interface are clean. Since we’ve been so happy with it overall, we’ve begun talking about a campus-wide blogging solution. It would seem like a great service to provide all 17,000 users (alumni, faculy, staff, and students) with blogs. Initially, Casey and I were considering modifying Wordpress to handle multiple blogs and using this as a customized solution.

However, this plan is no longer neccessary. Wordpress MU is a multi-user version of Wordpress and solves most our needs. I’ve tested it out here at NoSheep! using *.blog.nosheep.net. Setup is as simple as you’d expect from these guys and the end product rules.

The following is all we need technologically to get this integrated in our environment:
- automatic blog creation for users who want one
- LDAP authentication, or
- SSO portal integration

I’m thinking less than 4 hours total investment of time to roll this out.

Once that is in place we just need to find a home for it and sell IT management on the benefits for our constituents. In fact, we’re thinking initially the server footprint should be lightweight enough that we can reuse an existing server. That makes this a $0 solution in hard costs. Just a little labor and we’re good to go.

The only concerns we still have are:
- When will this exit beta?
- Can we deploy a beta product to this large of a group?
- Will we need a support and training structure for this?

beta, blog, blog, blogging, higher education, software, wordpress, wordpress mu

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10 Responses to “Plymouth State Looks At Wordpress MU”

spiralbound.net » WordPress LDAP Plugin says:

October 26, 2005 at 1:26 pm

[...] It looks like Pat Cavit who runs Zilla Smash has coded a nifty little plugin that allows WordPress to authenticate against an LDAP server. Needless to say, this has great potential for universities and organizations who have LDAP based account provisioning and would like to offer blogging to large numbers of people. So here’s version 1.01 of my LDAP Authentication plugin for WordPress 1.5.1. Note that this will NOT WORK with any previous version of WordPress. Installation is pretty simple: download, unzip into wp-content/plugins, activate, go to the “LDAP Options�? menu and set up your LDAP information. In the very near future we will be testing this LDAP plugin with WordPress MU. Check back for updates. We’ll post any code changes that are required for MU. [...]
spiralbound.net » Picking a Multiuser Blogging System says:

November 21, 2005 at 1:10 pm

[...] I’m a blogger. I’m also a systems administrator at a University. Thus, when the University decided to charter a project to offer each member of the institution a blog, I was selected to sit on the committee. We boiled all of the software choices down to Drupal, Movable Type, and Wordpress MU. [...]
No Sheep » Import Remote RSS in Wordpress says:

March 7, 2006 at 5:34 pm

[...] Anyway, when we began alpha testing WordPress MU for deployment at Plymouth State, we realized we needed a version of the importer that would allow a user to simply give a URL of their RSS and have it work. [...]
goodwitch says:

August 7, 2006 at 2:59 pm

Are you still happy with WordpressMU? I’ve got a project at UT Austin where I need to choose blog software that will support 5 different blogs. I’m a wordpress user myself and was thrilled to see WordpressMU. But before I take the leap…I wanted to see if you were still smiling…
zbtirrell says:

August 7, 2006 at 5:19 pm

We have had mixed happiness with it. Many of us at Plymouth State run our own Wordpress installs, some have even written a few plugins. This makes Wordpress the only supportable solution for us.

Our #1 complaint with Wordpress MU is the way they are handling the underlying database structure. Every user gets their own set of tables for their blog. This means even users who aren’t blogging frequently have 11 tables created for them. In our small alpha deployment this has grown to 900+ tables.

Individual tables do not benefit from most conventional database optimization techniques, so our blog database server takes special attention for tuning, even though it is not doing all that much traffic.
Will’s Blog - Corporate Blogging says:

February 14, 2007 at 1:34 am

[...] Others are already doing this (or something similar), and seem to be reasonably happy, despite a few problems (such as the 11-tables-per-user thing). No Comments [...]
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