On Monday we launched the blogs.mu system and site with quite a bit of coverage from a few tech and blogging sites, less so within the WPMU community, but on some levels that’s to be expected, as it’s of less interest to those who can install WPMU with their eyes behind their backs (yes some of them are THAT good…).
There have been a few questions and maybe some misunderstandings about the system, so I thought I would take some time out of my hectic schedule to describe the workings on the blogs.mu system, explain what it is (and more importantly what it isn’t) and how I hope that the experience in developing (and running blogs.mu) will benefit us all.
What is blogs.mu
blogs.mu promotes itself as “providing a blog network or community with the minimum of fuss”. What you see when you sign up and login to your administration area looks, to all intent and purposes, like your very own individual WordPress MU install, with your own Site Admin menu and pretty much everything you would see in a self hosted WordPress Mu system.
It looks like a WordPress MU system because, at it’s heart, that is what it is, a standard WordPress MU installation. It just happens to be shared amongst a lot more people.
What isn’t blogs.mu
Apologies for the bad title there. This is probably were a few misconceptions come in so I hope to, if nothing else, clarify some technical points here.
blogs.mu does not provide each site created with it’s own installation of WordPress MU and separate code base. That would take up a lot of space and resources on the server and, frankly, be too unwieldy for even the most geekiest of server admins.
It is also not a hacked up, heavily modified, fork of WordPress MU.
It is a clean, untouched, unmodified installation of WordPress MU with, and for me this is the most important part, zero, none, zip, not one core edit or hack.
Those who follow me in the MU forums will already know how averse I am to even touching the WordPress MU core and frequently warn others off doing so. My usual line is “you can do that with a plugin” and I’m proud to say that blogs.mu is a testament to that.
Absolutely everything that makes WordPress MU into blogs.mu is handled by a plugin (well not a single plugin, becuase that would be silly), and it is the fact that WordPress and WordPress MU are such powerful, and well thought out systems that make even thinking about such levels of customisation possible.
Hopefully (or maybe), over the course of a few posts, if people are interested, I will go through some of the plugins developed and highlight the technical and coding challenges that we encountered and, probably of most interest to the majority of you, how they where solved.