I was thinking about a little hack for a multiple blog system using wordpress. I came up with this idea.
How about a multi-blog system that abuses linux's adduser and /skel directory feature? Such as...
A user registration page feeds a script that triggers 'adduser'. Adduser copies wpmu files from the /skel directory. A database and user is created in mysql by username. The $dbname (eg $wpmu_username) and $username is added to the home/user/public-html/wp-inst/config file. The user, post registration, is redirected to their home index.php where they install their instance of wp as usual.
This would give the users access to other system resources, such as FTP (defaulted to their home directory and their images, css, index files for template creation/editing), *email*, LDAP, etc... owing to the fact that they are /users. This would also allow a system admin to limit the users disk space at account creation.
This will give URL's of domain.com/~username.
Which can be, relatively, easily converted to user.domain.com with a little apache2/sites-enabled/wpmu file.
I don't know if this is possible, I'm a designer; not a programmer. But it seemed to me that I should mention the idea. Maybe someone else can see how this could work and then jump on it. Or, maybe its not possible at all. Who knows. But there's the idea anyway.
I'm off to see if I can make this work. If anyone has any ideas or would like to help out, I'm mike#strixy.com.