It’s been about a month now since I installed and converted to Wordpress Mu on my server. I thought I would take this opportunity to document my progress and to give people a bit of an insight into what is required to get a site up and running. Hopefully if you are considering developing a site with Mu, this will help ease any worries you might have.

In January of 2008 I decided that I was going to start a website. I’ve picked up a few contracts before in the past to design other peoples’ website but it’s hard to be credible in web development without a website. As a high school computer science teacher, I decided that I would make a blog that all my students could interact with and access all the information they would need to stay up to date with all my courses. Simple enough - Wordpress was the obvious choice. I went out and found a web hosting company with Cpanel and Wordpress support (not necessary but really helpful). My only advice is to shop around for one with the best support and service.

The first six months went really well; my students were posting comments and checking the site daily. Engaged students - what more could I want? This year in September however, I decided that I wanted to up the ante; I decided that I wanted to teach students some internet and web development techniques through blogging. They would each need their own blogs. My options were to either give them each an ftp account on my server (and some DB access), have them each install Wordpress, or investigate Mu.

In September I installed Mu on my server, in addition to my existing Wordpress install. I was effectively running two blogs, one for myself on Wordpress where my students could login to post comments, and another I called the students section where they had to use a separate login to access and create their blogs. Mu was pretty easy to install, I had it up and running in a couple hours. I quickly installed over 100 themes and a whole whack of plug-ins to satisfy my students’ needs for individuality (of course, at least 10 of them all chose the same theme with the flames on the side).  

Problems

1)The main landing page for the students section was my first problem.  The only theme that is really available (that I could find) with Mu functions is the basic Wordpress theme that everyone starts Wordpress with. This theme was modified to display a list of all the blogs on the system in order of the most recently updated blog. 

2)My second problem was that users had to keep two different user names and passwords in order to effectively use the site. What I really wanted was to integrate these two systems into one landing page for my site that would show my blog and still be able to showcase my students’ blogs.

How I Resolved These Problems

1)My first step was to install my selected (and customized) Wordpress theme on Mu and select it for my students’ section blog.

2)I also had to export all the posts from my Wordpress blog and bring them into my Mu students’ section blog (this is actually really easy and painless to do from the manage section of the blog). After setting up the widgets and plug-ins the same as the other site, I essentially took over the students section with my Wordpress blog.  This resolved students having to use two separate logins.

3)To showcase my students blogs on my landing page, I had to customize my theme some more to get the students content on it. Wordpress Mu produces a couple site-wide feeds that combine all blog posts/comments/ etc.  To get this on my page I used the already installed RSS widget that comes with Wordpress to display the most recent 5 post on one of my sidebars displaying the side-wide feed. Side-note: as a teacher I also monitor the comments feed pretty regularly.

4)I also wanted to display a list of most of the blogs on my site. To do this I took a basic search widget and gutted it and pasted in the code from the original Mu theme that had the list of the most recently updated blogs.

Benefits of Mu

For me, Wordpress Mu has given me ways to educate my students on a wide range of topics online in a more controlled environment. Mu is excellent for any group of people or organization to collaborate on a small or large scale. It enables the creation of a social network of bloggers focused very narrowly on a specific topic or broadly on a wide range of fields. As an administrator, Wordpress Mu’s tools provide me with a valuable reach into all facets of the network. I can easily login to any of my students’ blogs and edit comments or posts, reset passwords, blog spam. I even installed a custom widget that swaps inappropriate words with more school appropriate terms.

Future

As my blog develops I am always looking for ways to create more value for my users (students). Part of this plan involves how my users will interact with Mu; for me this means developing more ways for them to interact with each other and the rest of the internet through my website. As the blog progresses I plan on researching / developing new applications of Mu.  I would love to see some plug-ins designed specifically for the Mu main landing page that highlight and showcase all the blogs and users on the system. Website visitors should be able to quickly and effortlessly navigate through the whole collection of blogs, vote and peer review each others’ blogs, communicate and share ideas on a network wide level. If you are already using or know of any such plug-ins that work with Mu be sure to share them with the rest of us, as I develop more programs I’ll do the same.

Is it right for you?

I would say that if you’ve been comfortable modifying or customizing themes in Wordpress at all, you’re probably qualified enough to try customizing Mu. From my experience, most all of the API is pretty much the same, with the exception that there are some extra functions for Mu that I still have to discover more of. If you are concerned that Mu might be too complex to manage with your experience at this time then my advice would be to stick with Wordpress for a bit longer and install Mu on a testing server or in another directory on your web server just to play around with it for a bit.  There is no cost to try it out, and in the meantime try and learn more about the Wordpress API by building your own plug-ins or customizing the themes.

I think it would be great if as a community we could work to customize and develop some more themes that are designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of Mu. I’ve looked all over and haven’t really been able to find any. Over-time if we could do this it would be easier for more people to get started with Mu.