Plymouth State Looks At Wordpress MU
September 8, 2005 | 17 Comments
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?
Tags: beta, blog, blogging, higher education, software, wordpress, wordpress mu