Wordpress MU
It looks like Medicine is using Wordpress MU to provide blog services to its community. I'm curious if anyone on here has had some experience running Wordpress MU and what your thoughts are. How about Wordpress power users? Anyone run a website entirely off Wordpress (i.e. use WP as a CMS)?
At the moment I am toying with the idea of offering Wordpress (using the MU flavour) as an end-user service to the OISE community. The fact that wordpress.com uses the same codebase is interesting (scalability shouldn't be an issue, as is performance of such a system).
I'd love to hear from all sides, admins, end-users, developers, consumers... you tell me! In particular I'm interested how people are using MS Outlook's RSS reader with blogs. Imagine receiving institutional news via RSS instead of direct to inbox delivery for a bazillion mailboxes...
- Login to post comments
- 996 reads
Big Fan of WP
I built and administered a site from 2006 to 2008 using WP as a CMS before converting to a social networking format based on Drupal (not unlike this site - in fact, exactly like this site and sitting on the same code base). WP always impressed me on a number of fronts relevant to your situation at OISE:
It will be interesting to see how a WP MU implementation could be woven into the rest of the university's fabric. That said, these days I preach Drupal.
We use wordpress
We run the CIO's website off wordpress.
From an end-user perspective, its really easy to use and update. We haven't had any problems so far.
We haven't implemented any RSS feeds, but probably should.
UofT Magazine is based on Wordpress
Hi,
We use Wordpress as a CMS for our Magazine site (http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/). Basically, every article is a blog post, and every issue is a category. We've developed the theme/template, and a handful of other features, such as our "dynamic homepage"...
As a developer + admin, I'd say it's fun and easy to implement new features for the site. Not to mention the fact that many features we'd want in a CMS have already been developed as a plugin (if it's not already built-in to the core). The back-end is also super easy to manage; we're able to upgrade plugins and even Wordpress itself with just a mouse click. :D
Our editors and their assistants have no problems using the system...
Wordpress does provide standard RSS feeds that people can subscribe via MS Outlook. (RSS feeds from some other CMS don't work with Outlook)
Sam
So far so good...
Well, I'm glad that everyone's had positive experiences with WP. I myself am just diving into it, and I think it's an excellent publishing platform with lots of potential... thanks for the feedback so far!
Now let me expand this a bit further: what do you think of Wordpress as a centralized service? Much like UTORweb or UTORmail, where any university community member (UTORid holders, I suppose) can request their own blog at, say, http://blogs.utoronto.ca/blogname, where you get to pick the "blogname" part of the URL. Departments and "large"-ish organizational units (e.g. student clubs, research projects, etc), could host their own domain names, whether utoronto.ca or otherwise.
The advantages to this approach are numerous:
So... what do you think? Comments?
Campus Groups are on WP MU
I think Student Life is already providing Wordpress MU for all of the campus groups. (http://www.studentlife.utoronto.ca/groups/news.htm). Their support site is here http://wphelp.sa.utoronto.ca/
Nice!
Thanks, Sam! I'll be sure to check that out. If you happen to know who's the "behind the scenes" person for that service, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know. I'd like to chat about their experience setting up, maintaining and customizing (e.g. UTORauth integration) Wordpress MU from a systems admin perspective.
BuddyPress and VideoPress
I stumbled upon BuddyPress and the Video Solution Framework (based on VideoPress). The best part is that it works with Wordpress MU.
Blog, CMS, UTORtube and UTORfacebook rolled into one neato package that actually looks good (visually) and scales... hmmm...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?
Two thumbs up
My last effort at the University of Richmond (spring of 2007) was to install WpMU as the new blog app for courses. I believe it is still in use and cared for. Great platform, very stable.
CommentPress
Another great theme (and plugin) for Wordpress, that works in WPMU, is Commentpress from the Institute for the Future of the Book - http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/
Allows users to identify breaks in the text and allows for commenting on these granular bits of text. Great for getting specific comments on lines, paragraphs, or pages.