Setting up blogs at your university, college or school
When I first started blogging, the thing that I really craved more than anything was the facility to simply set up a blogging system for my institution. Something which could give all the staff and students blogs and which I could install without having to first complete a masters in computer science.
Well now, a few years later, there are a heap of options available and which a clued up education developer or, perhaps, Blogsavvy can give all your teachers and students instant, branded, controlled and secure blogs.
Here are some of the options:
Manila from Userland is the original multiuser blog tool and while it’s pretty clunky will scale and work well over a large organisation (c.$500 p/year for education)
Drupal is a powerful, flexible and clean Content / Community Management System… “Community Plumbing”. It allows the creation of sites with collaborative books, polls, ’stories’, forums, public aggregation and, among other things, each user to have their own blog. It’s pretty cool but there are disadvantages such as users having centralised rather tan individualised blogs though ($open source).
A powerful and professional blog application. Great heritage but perhaps not the tool it once was (compared to the competition) and the most expensive of the bunch ($300 - $1300)
WordPress Multi User is essentially an application of the celebrated WordPress weblogging system which allows for anyone to create their own, fully functional WordPress blog. Heaps of potential but still in alpha stages of development… potential to rule the roost ($open source)
Plog looks like a pretty exciting option being an open source, pretty featureful system that supports multi-user blogging rather well indeed (such as here at Bloc de BalearWeb I could even do it without speaking Spanish so that’s gotta be easy :o) - thanks to Todd for the link!). Still in early stages of development but gaining ground ($open source)
Roller is most an open source multi-user weblogging app and the fact that Sun are implementing it in their enterprise software. You can get Roller up and running in a multi-user weblogging environment as JRoller have done (go there and set up your own Roller blog if you fancy). Can be a little simple - but that’s a good thing, right :o) ($open source)
- Posted on: May 26th, 2005
- 10 Comments
- Category: Archives
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Thanks, James. What about the Java application, Blojsom? I noticed one of the Blogtalk Downunder speakers (can’t remember who, offhand) mentioned that his institution had decided to deploy it. I looked at the documentation over at Sourceforge, and it looks quite interesting. It seems well suited to managing multiple blogs. The one question I had about it, was the fact that content is saved in files (I think), instead of in a database. If that’s the case, it might not be quite as efficient space-wise as other options.
That’s a good question, in my initial trials there weren’t any working examples (which I could access) to evaluate so it kinda fell by the wayside… but as ever if no-one else is doing it the best thing is to do it yourself! So, here goes…
Here’s an install… I’m not quite blown away but it could be just the start of something: http://student.cofa.unsw.edu.au/blojsom/blog/default/
One of the reasons I like WPMU is that WP is by far the biggest blog / OS community and therefore you’ve got a lot of help / themes / plugins etc.
We have blojsom running at blogs.zanestate.edu (check out the “community blog”). I blogged about it here. If you’d like to give it a try, just give a shout.
Thanks for that Todd… I got an install running yesterday but am pretty unimpressed with it so far… for sopme reason I’m getting timeouts on those links but will try again later
We´re testing blojsom at USC, here’s an example: http://ietulla.usc.es:8080/blojsom/blog/carlos/
Thanks for that, I managed to get Blojsom up at IncSub and have written a quick review, would love your feedback: http://incsub.org/?p=31
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