WordPress MU

Hi!

I'm currently working on a project where it's needed to customize the frontpage view from the post view. (E.g. different titles and images on front view than in post view).

I thought of using the excerpt for the purpose, but then I need an WYSIWYG editor for the excerpt since the users not are html-experts...

Any ideas for a solution?

http://wpmututorials.com/elsewhere/anatomy-of-a-home-page-wordpresscom/

And bone up on theme development in general:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates
http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Template_Tags

Thanks for the info. One more question though:

At the wordpress.com frontpage there is 11 featured blogs with a small picture, post-title and link to the blog.

I want to achieve the same thing, and my question is:

Is the frontpage created by hand (e.g. someone is editing the frontpage), or is it possible with some tools to achieve the cut out of the main picture wordpress.com got on the frontpage easily?

You can do it automatically. We actually implemented something like that on one of our sites. I hadn't released the code, yet. But, just for you - here ya go:

http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/featured-blog-widget

Note that we created a customized theme so the widget displays in the main content area - not in a sidebar. I haven't tried it in a side bar, and it might not work as well there.

It seems like the screenshots I put on that site aren't working properly. Annoying. But, play with it - I think you'll get the idea.

We're using it in conjunction with the local_avatars plugin, since most of our users don't understand gravatars. The one caveat there is that local avatars has to be turned on in both the featured blog and the blog from which you're calling the widget.

Oh, and this widget will only work in 2.8.x - it uses the new widget API that was released in 2.8