No sooner had I raised the question about the eventual need for management tools for the multi-user version of the open source weblog engine WordPressMU then James Farmer contacted me with a link to a plugin which provides at least rudimentary management facilities. If you pop over to one Derek Ditch's site he offers a basic management plugin for WordPressMU. Make sure you download the updated version and place it in the plugins directory of wp-inst>wp-content. So it's now possible to create and delete blogs, and reset passwords from a single interface. There's obviously a lot more that could be done with this, e.g. blog backup, grouping, but even at this basic level Derek's work is to be applauded.
So I then moved on to tackle how the owner of a WordPressMU blog could select their own appearance and what do you know … with a little more work this is possible to. The key issue here is that WordPressMU is based on the latest beta of WordPress (1.5) and as such adopts it's new theme model which is a bit more complicated than the current release version of WordPress (1.2). But it should be possible.
I'm still left wondering why such an important area of development for WordPress doesn't give the impression of being part of the mainstream work, e.g. Donncha and Derek's inputs were sourced from their own blogs. It would be good to hear some perspectives from people who know.
