So - we have choosen WP MU today as blogging platform - after tryouts with blogging on Typo3 and Drupal failed for our purposes. Why?

Typo3 is our first-choice content management system - and the use of wp for blogging will also not change this. As an old-style content management system it allows you to publish structured content - in a very organized way. We are using it in a multi-site-approach and are being able to manage more than a dozen of websites very effective and efficient. But for blogging there are two tiny, but important things missing:

1. backend usability for just entering simple title-bodytext-postings - blog entries are realized as tt_news postings in Typo3. TT_news is a very powerful news systems - top-down structured by a categorization system and so on. We are using the categorization system for a lot of more extension within Typo3 and it is very handy - but if you want some beginners to just entering some text - it is a technical overkill.
2. pingback and trackback functionality - pingback and trackback functionality are the innovative new things of blogging systems - comparing to old-style content management. They allow the interconnection and inter-communication of blogging systems - this is not part of the old-style content management concept - as well as not of Typo3. There is an extension for Typo3 - the TIMTAB extensions of Ingo Renner. They provide a good start, but they are still not working for good - regarding the pingback and trackback functionality.

Drupal - on the other hand - is an collaborative content publishing systems - very powerful for the scenario of many authors publishing under one url which then can re-organized in a portal. But for the approach of having unique URLs for the blogs (technical spoken: as a multi-site-implementation) - there are still issues - as Google indexed in our tryout all the “nodes” beneath all the URLs which meant double and not unique content.

Just to shorten this here now - we gave up so far - as it meant to much individual programming to solve those issues in one system. Instead of system development we wanted to use our ressources for content and knowhow publishing. Therefore - for the moment - we are using what everybody is using for blogging and trying out the WP MU.

During the next weeks we will migrate all the old content from our Drupal system to this one.