An Experiment with WordPress Mu June 29, 2007
Recently, we launched a blog network for Georgetown Preparatory School's Summer ESL Program . The purpose of this project was to give the Georgetown Prep teachers a new way to communicate with their students, and to give the students a new way to practice their English language skills. Also, we wanted to give our staff an opportunity to experiment with WordPress Mu (pronounced "mew"), the multi-user blog program. Just launched on Monday, the students at teachers over at GPrep are already starting to get the hang of things, with three of the seven classes at this year's summer camp taking advantage of the blog. The best example is Mr. Scronce's blog. This teacher gives his students a daily topic to write about, related to class discussions or readings. Currently, the students are reading and discussing the book Kaffir Boy, so they wrote some blog entries about their initial reactions to the book. The teacher made grammatical corrections using different text colors in each student's blog entry.
For the Georgetown Prep blog network, we set up each class has its own blog, with the teachers registered as "editors" and the students registered as "authors". These blogs are linked together using blogrolls on the domain gprepblogs.bivings.com. We tried to keep the site as simple as possible, and did little customized work (we tweaked the colors and header of a WordPress theme but did little else).
For individual users, WordPress Mu seems to be working great. Thus far, the teachers and students have had no problems accessing and contributing to their blogs. I think this speaks to the ease with which WordPress functions: few or none of the people from this group have a lot of experience with computers or technology, and they are able to successfully contribute to an online discussion.
However, from an administrative perspective, things get a bit confusing. I have a significant amount of experience with the administrative tools within WordPress, so I took on the task of setting up all of the users in the GPrep blog network. In all, there are 8 blogs, consisting of a total of 8 teachers (editors) and about 90 students (authors). Since we wanted to simplify the process for the teachers and students using the site, we set up their user accounts ahead of time, using a variation of my personal email address. This way, all the users had to do was login and start writing. For me, however, things were a bit more difficult.
Although there is a "site admin" portion of WordPress Mu which gives administrators access to all the backends of all the blogs in the network, the process for signing up new users is a bit clumsy. First, they have to be registered with the main site. Then, they have to be added to the blog to which they will be contributing. So basically, as I was setting up this blog network, I had to add each user to the system twice. This was annoying. I suppose this process is easier for individuals who want to register themselves with a WordPress Mu site, but unfortunately we didn't have the luxury of letting people register themselves.
The site navigation is also a bit clumsy from the backend. It's a little difficult to switch between blogs if you are managing several at the same time. Once you enter the backend of a blog, there is no way to return to the backend of the main administration panel or to the panels of other blogs without first returning to the live site or typing in the wp-admin URL.
It was also annoying that I had to manually enter the blogroll 9 times (once on each teacher blog and once on the main site). I was really hoping that because these blogs were all created under the same umbrella that there would be an automatic way to link them together and aggregate their content. While our main developer did find eventually find a plugin that publishes the most recent post from each blog on the front page, we didn't find any other way to aggregate the rest of the content, categories, comments, or authors. This was our developer's major complaint. Apparently, while most regular WordPress plugins work with the individual blogs in the network, there aren't many effective tools for aggregating information on the site. For example, with the GPrep blog network, we wanted the main blog to act as an aggregator for all of the content on each of the individual teacher blogs, rather than as a blog itself. We found this really difficult to do, mostly for a lack of plugins. While WordPress Mu probably works great for someone who has many blogs or for groups of individual bloggers, it doesn't work all that well for "networks" of blogs, where all the content is aggregated under one main umbrella. Our developer noted that WordPress Mu seems a bit incomplete and that for our purposes, Drupal would have been a better choice.
I don't dobut that WordPress Mu is a powerful tool for managing many individual blogs from one place or grouping blogs together through one site. However, for developing a network of blogs that share content, WordPress Mu gets a bit tricky and is need of some additional features.
