WordPress MU

I'm very interested in chatting about using MU for education, schools, and online learning. Has anyone had any experience with this thus far?

Hi Matt. I'm currently in charge of finding new blog software for Brown University. I'm looking at WPMU and Drupal. We currently use MT and have found its a pain to administer.

I would love to give you feedback on WPMU, but I can't get it installed. I went to the Nightly Builds page, downloaded the file, but there are no install instructions in there. I installed, went to the index page, everything passed, and then I clicked on the link to setup the database, and I get a 404 for the setup-config.php file. I can't find it anywhere in the package. Plus, the index page is telling us that mod_rewrite is not enabled when it actually is. We use it all over out server.

So if you can tell me where I can find install instructions, the setup-config.php file and get past the mod_rewrite error, I'd love to get WPMU up and running and testing.

One last question. I was told by someone at another school that WPMU creates new tables for each new user blog. Is that true? Does this scale to three thousand blogs?

Thanks.

Patrick
Brown University

WPMU is currently lacking a strong administration interface. However, we are working on that at this very moment so check back around the first of next week and we should have that added along with several bug fixes.

On the issue of scaling: One way of doing it is by splitting the blogs into different databases as outlined here and it's completely backwards compatible with Wordpress making it easier to merge changes.
I'd say that WPMU is very comfortable with 3000 blogs, I've seen installations with more than twice that number!

I'm also researching blogs for deployment in education (Southwest Tennessee Community College). Specifically, I've been doing work to integrate faculty blogs and class wikis into WebCT.

Out of curiosity, are any of you aware of any implementations of WPMU using LDAP to authenticate/register users? I can live with my faculty having to remember another username/password, but I'd really rather not. I know there is a plug-in for the single-user version of WP to authenticate agains LDAP, but I've not found anyone using it for MU.

No one to my knowledge is using LDAP with wpmu at the moment. However, a general rule of thumb is that "if it can be done with WP it can be done with WPMU". Ofcourse some tweaking may be needed.

http://patcavit.com/2005/05/11/wordpress-ldap-and-playing-nicely/

This might help.

A few months after your original post, Matt - but here it goes.

I'm currently setting up a couple of installs of WPMU for use at our high school. This has all run around in my head for several months as I've watched WPMU develop - and I finally have a plan.

One install will be integrated into our school website which until this point has been a one woman show (me) with everyone funneling info to me to publish. Now many staff members will be publishing/posting to the site.

The other install will be for student blogs. School administrators are concerned about student blogs being viewed by the public until we have some experience under our belts. On this install only registered users of each blog will be able to view them.

We're also introducing a Novels class this year. The class is open to read-aholics and will not have a class period in which they meet. It will all be done through a blog.

Will be happy to share our experiences along the way! And I'm very open to suggestions!