WordPress MU

I've set up a blog aimed at movie fans - it's the online equivalent of a film journal (hence the name!).

It is early days (well actually the second day!) yet but already theres been a fair bit of interest and we now have over 30 blogs up and running.

I'd appreciate any feedback or comments - as I get to grips with Wordpress MU I'll be adding and tweaking pretty much everything!

The site is at http://filmjournal.net/

The site has now had a new lick of paint - we ran a competition to come up with a new design and I think the winner is fantastic.

What do you guys think?

We've added a few custom features including a list of the latest post from the last x update blogs, the latest comments and a few other bits and bobs that aren't part of the standard MU install.

Nice site - you have lots of users..

q: What did you use to create the filmroll page?

What do you mean by the filmroll page?

How did you get it up and going? I have over 5,000 members and want to let them have their own blogs. Please help me out here!!

I guess the All Journals page...
http://filmjournal.net/index.php?page_id=4

That was my own code - I was originally using a plugin, but found that my own code gave me more control.

It's just some simple PHP making use of some new tables I've created that are populated on each update to make searching and listing from all blogs easier.

nice work. How did you get so many people to use your site?

Just plugged it on my other sites mainly.

I've now integrated a bbPress forum into the site and am including threads on the front page, I have the site-wide search which I'll be releasing as an mu-plugin soon and I've also modified the mu-admin-bar plugin to something more useful for me.

It's all hanging together quite well now :)

I've now added the ability for users to rate blogs on the site. The ratings are shown on every page and also in the main index.

Oooo ... awesome idea! How'd you do it?

:D

I'll try and extract the code from my site and I'll post it up to wpmudev asap.

Effectively I've got two new tables, one (blog_rating) which stores each user's rating for each blog and another, (blog_rating_average) which contains the average vote - this is separated out to reduce the strain of a big query and calculation on each call.

I've also got a new script called wp_rate.php which handles all of the ratings and then I've plugged all of this into my modified mu-admin-bar so it can be accessed on every page.

It's also tied into the latestposts code that I use in my search code as this is what is used to display the blogs index and I didn't want to have loads of queries when one will do.

Therefore it may not be very easy to release as a separate entity, but I will see what I can do.

could you also release the code that patches your search release?

Which code is that? The latest search has everything in it as far as I know :)

I'll have a go at doing two packages of the ratings code which can be used with or without the search stuff.

Thanks Colin, that's what i was driving at..lol :)

Any news on the Blog Rating modifications you made? I took a look over at wpmudev and couldn't see it there.

:)

Not yet - hopefully I'll get it sorted this week. Got caught up on some major server upgrades so haven't had a chance to sort this out.

I'll post a new thread as soon as it's ready.

http://ntmy.org

another "big" and very much modified MU site. ;)

suprb, that's a very nicely designed website. It looks like you've got MU integration working in nicely. Though I have to ask, do you have one generic theme across all sites with a few customizeable options? Or can users pick their own themes?

Hey Colin, have you looked at this:
http://www.masugadesign.com/the-lab/scripts/unobtrusive-ajax-star-rating-bar/

Hi all,

I thought I should revisit this with an update on my plans...

I am unfortunately going to be dropping WPMU as a platform later this year as I have found that it just isn't for me :( I am actually deep in coding an alternative application that is more suited to my needs for the site as I find WPMU cumbersome to develop for and far too much of a spam trap with no decent built-in means of cutting it down.

Obviously I can't promote myself on here as that wouldn't be polite, but I'll be posting updates to FilmJournal.net in the future if anyone is interested in alternative platforms.

Colin

Good luck, colin.

Thank you - I think I'll be having a few sleepless nights as I code :D

Oh, probably. I know I dream in code at this point. :D I would like to see what you eventually come up with.

What are you coding it in? Ruby on rails? (everyone else is...)

Nah - just basic PHP/MySQL. Not going through learning another framework :)

To update on this, I have made a few more modifications to my WPMU install to add an approval process - this has meant I can reopen registrations and spam blogs can't be added to the site directories automatically.

In effect, this means that the problem with spam blogs has been removed altogether and I can clear them out without them ever being visible.

This is a short-term solution to my problem which means developing my own software is of less urgency now.

What might be easier than writing you own whole platform would be to make a plugin to use some of the same systems used to combat comment spam to look at blog posts, or to save server resources the first 3 blog posts made to each blog since spogs generally will not have more than 2 posts before the spammer moves on to the next target, then make a moderation que under site admin where you can mark flase positives or delete the blog if it is spam.

if you do choose to do something like this, I'd love to use it on my blog as well if you were to share it.