Big IDEA

Multiuser blog frustration

28 February 2005

I’m looking for a blogging system that allows new users to register and create a blog and that allows multiple authors to post to the same blog. So far it looks like the only free options are pLog and WordPress MU.

Following up on reader comments from James’s Multi User Weblogging, I decided to evaluate Roller. I was aware of Roller but always ignored it because it ran on java. I decided to overcome my fear (ignorance) of java and set it up on a test box here. Despite knowing nothing about java, I was able to get Tomcat/jakarta and the Roller software up and running in less than a day. That includes two tries because I ran into trouble setting up a db with utf-8 encoding on MySQL 3.something; I ended up putting it on a more modern box with MySQL 4.1. Problem solved, but that ate up a lot of time.

Wow, I’m impressed with Roller. A brief rundown of some of the plusses:

• configurable editor interfaces–plain, WYSIWYG (java, IE-only and Mozilla-only)
• timed availability of comments (enable for n days)
• enable/disable comments (per-post or blog-wide)
• nice blogroll import from OPML
• bookmark import
• create static pages–the link is created for you and added to the main navigation for you blog
• per-user themes
• spell check
• new user registration
• rss: site-wide, per-blog, and per-category

The only thing I see it lacking for our purposes is the ability to have multiple authors post to a single blog. So, we couldn’t have a class blog, but individual students could have their own blogs. For me this is the dilemma, and it’s why I’ll probably keep pLog (ours) around for the time being. Plus it looks like pLog is ready for a new major release any day now, which will hopefully address some of the issues I have with it right now–namely the UI and how there is no easy way for the user to log in and click an “edit this post” link to edit a post or to click “new” to create a new post. Overall there is no flow between the clumsy admin interface and the blogs themselves.

Another problem with pLog is that it has a simple permissions design, but that can really be a disadvantage. For example, I can set up an instructor as blog “owner” and put students in as authors, but the students have just as much power over content management as the instructor; the only difference is that the instructor/owner can change the theme.

Maybe WordPress MultiUser is really the way to go. I used the regular WP for a class blog previously and liked having the multi-author blog. But I also really like Roller now; maybe the developers will add multi-author blogs soon.