WordPress MU

I apologize if this has been covered before. I did a search of the forum and came up with nothing.

I'm at a university looking to manage an instance of WPMU for many separate users and blogs. That's the point of WPMU, right? Can any of those users create their own theme and use it on their blog without having me, as the server admin do anything? And no one else has access to this individual's theme. If I end up with hundreds of blogs and users, I don't want to be managing their custom themes if I don't have to.

Thanks.

By default, no.

Wordpress.com, which is basically WPMU, hosts lots of separate blogs and doesn't allow this either. Basic security says you shouldn't let people upload their own PHP code to the server, which giving people the ability to edit/add their own themes would do.

However, there are plugins available which will provide some theme editing capability. Some just enable the theme editor like in the standalone wordpress. But this means that if anyone edits the theme it would modify EVERY user's site.

Other plugins like Userthemes Revisited will make a copy of a theme that is already on the server and give people the option to edit just their own version which will not affect other users. Still bad for security, IMO.

WordPress.com uses the approach of letting people edit just the CSS of an existing theme on the server. This gives users the ability to customize a site's look and feel but doesn't open up the security risk of them editing the actual PHP.