Pimping the WPMU for ucalgaryblogs.ca

I’ve been slowly tweaking the WPMU install that drives ucalgaryblogs.ca – it’s not quite ready for prime time, but it’s darned close.

It’s now got:

  • multiple blogs per user, and multiple users per blog
  • subdomain hosting for each blog (i.e., myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca)
  • domain mapping – want to use your own custom domain? want myblog.com to point to the blog you’ve got at myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca? there’s a setting for that, and then you just have to tell me what domain you want me to tell the webserver to respond to.
  • multilingual admin interface. English. French. Spanish. Chinese. Klingon. Well, I still haven’t found the Klingon.po file for WordPress, but once I do… *shakesfist*
  • over 100 themes, most of which are customizable. Want a photoblog? Got it covered. Newsletter? Done. Research project? Sure thing.
  • 500MB of upload space quota per user. This could be increased if needed.
  • Sitewide tag cloud and archives – want to find out who else is writing about mitochondrial RNA? Just hit the tag…
  • Blog directory listing all blogs in the system (currently, some test blogs, and the UC Dinos Football Blog! WOOHOO!)
  • A handy-dandy blog manager bar at the top of all pages – if you’re logged in, it gives you easy access to anything you want to do. If  you’re not logged in, it gives you an easy place to login from, from any page on the ucalgaryblogs.ca service.
  • Lots of other great WordPress goodies, like podcast serving, editing from your iPhone or iPod Touch, great visual editor for posts (with spel chekker, too!) and collaborative blogs with multiple authors.

But, there are still a few things on my todo list before I consider it fully ready for prime time:

  • Documentation. It helps if there’s some M to RTF. I’ll be linking and borrowing heavily from the great stuff already out there…
  • A UCalgary theme (or themes) for sites that need to look all offishul ‘n junk.
  • better antispam – I can’t use Akismet because I have a budget of $0.00, and SpamKarma2 is EOL. Maybe Mollom? It doesn’t play well with WPMU yet…
  • hmm… actually, that’s pretty much it. once it goes live, it can be tweaked on the fly…

Once it’s been live for a bit, I’ll look at stuff like BuddyPress, integration with Flickr, integration with MediaWiki, and a bunch of other stuff. So far, it’s been fun setting up the service. Now to start rolling this sucker out…

7 thoughts on “Pimping the WPMU for ucalgaryblogs.ca”

  3. D\’Arcy-
    What kind of stats support are you providing with each blog?
    While Mollum may be stopping a lot of obvious spams on your blog- it\’s letting through a lot of \”Wow, I like your site, man\” type posts that seem harmless- but don\’t add anything to the discussion.

  4. David, I’m really REALLY sorry about the annoying spam comments that get sent out on any post subscriptions. I cringe every time a spam comment gets through, just thinking about the emails that must be going out in response.

    Both Akismet and SK2 were letting through loads of spam (both real spam and the silly innocuous-looking posts that are really just testing the perimeter and trying to get stuff whitelisted). It _looks_ like Mollom has finally warmed up, and is nearly batting 1000. Hopefully that’s the end of the spam for awhile (touchwood, jynx, cringe).

    For the wpmu service, I’m thinking of running Google Analytics for aggregate stats, but am definitely open to suggestions (especially wrt per-user and per-blog stats). Ideally there should be a stats panel, similar to what WordPress.com offers, without having to send everyone to another service to sign up…

  5. Blog directory listing all blogs in the system (currently, some test blogs, and the UC Dinos Football Blog! WOOHOO!)
    A handy-dandy blog manager bar at the top of all pages – if you’re logged in, it gives you easy access to anything you want to do. If you’re not logged in, it gives you an easy place to login from, from any page on the ucalgaryblogs.ca service.

    Can you share these please? 🙂

    Also, you actually should be able to get Akismet free as long as you put links to them in the themes. We are working on that now, and we will probably be switching from SK2 to Akismet, which kinda scares me.

    As for documentation, I have some you can borrow: htp://umwblogs.org/wiki and a few screencasts that I will be doing over a few like the Design Tab screencast: http://screencasts.umwblogs.org

    Great stuff D\’Arcy, I can\’t wait to see it, here is a look at the UMW Blogs redesign: http://siteredisgn.umwblogs.org

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