Last October, in BlogBuilder Highlights I was singing the praises of the University of Warwick's enterprise weblog system whilst making the case for JISC involvement in facilitating the availability of such facilities for other institutions. There's been some interesting developments on the open-source front. Over on James Farmer's blog we find Open source enterprise blogging through WordPress in which he outlines his success with the multi-user version of the very popular open source WordPress blog engine, i.e. WordPressMU.
James has had more success than me in installing WPMU. But his success is a very positive development because, if an educational institution or organization can install their own hosted multi-user blogging solution, then the scope for the development of interesting educational applications/tools based on such an engine is considerable, e.g. ePortfolios.
I have a few concerns, however.
I like WordPress a lot and, as soon as I have some time, Auricle will be ported to that engine. I'm not sure, however, despite the presence of a WordPressMU home page that the main body of WordPress developers buy into the WordPressMU vision. For example a question about WordPressMU in the main support forums stimulated the following response from a WordPress developer:
“… WordPress MU is a distinct project and it is not part of WordPress proper. You will have to contact the developer directly or find WP MU support forums somewhere.” (19 Jan 2005)
The key figure in WordPressMU development is Donncha 0 Caoimh.
Donncha's WordPress category within his blog Holy Shmoly! appears to be the nearest thing to support that exists and he's incredibly helpful. Donncha appears to be doing a sterling job of keeping this very important show on the road. Nevertheless, the paucity of documentation is 'challenging' although, as James Farmer shows us, it's possible to succeed.
I think it's essential that WordPress.org recognizes that the multi-user hosted variant of WordPress is a key part of its development, not some minority fork. As a start they should aim to integrate support into the main site as soon as possible.
