Scribd needs some more handling because of the Access Key - therefore this is postponed.

I posted a request on this in German on my personal weblog. Maybe you have some insights to share with me. Thanks in advance.

1. First - comment the section if ( $blog->site_id != 1 ) continue; because while using unique URLs for the WPMU blogs, each one has its own $site_id (see this posting!)
2. Further - while executing WPs core functionality each method needs to be set into the scope/context of the blog the external user has definded. The methods therefore have the $blog_id variable as first argument but none of the methods are taking this into account. Therefore I added the following line after the do_action()-call: switch_to_blog($blog_id); . But watch out for the two need mw_ methods - here the authors of the xml-rpc-file changed the variable characters from blog_id to blog_ID.

My requirements are as followed:

• Multi-Site Management - as from a discussion with Martin Koser - this can be realized by namespaces and different entry points towards the wiki system
• Multi-Site-Templating - I do not see any out of the box solutions by the standard wiki systems - maybe solved via a dynamic/intelligent template with different CSS style definitions
• Authentification against some third party system - KM users are set up in our community systems and must be authenticated against these applications
• Threaded discussion boards on wiki pages - the wiki is used for documentation purposes - once the documentation is finished it shall be discussed - this needs some kind of forum integrated in the wiki or at least the possibility of integrating a third party solutions (i.e. bbpress, Vanilla or punbb)

After digging in the WikiMatrix, doing some researching (see results) and talking to Martin Koser I started out in giving DokuWiki another try (DokuWiki was also the choice of my first evaluation a year ago!). Though Martin told me it’s the right choice I am not yet completely convinced - and therefore open for anymore suggestions.

Therefore I had to build me a WPMU plugin with some extended functionality -

• get_last_updated_ext() - list all blogs from all sites
• show_list_of_blogs() - some handy presentation of the list
• get_latest_posts() - list latest postings from all sites doing a UNION-query over all WP_n_Posts-Tables (not very lean - but what the heck!)
• show_latest_posts() - some handy presentation

Then I set up some CD-compatible template - well … I don’t like the templating logic of WP - somehow I think this is also very much draining on the ressources. While the backend usability and the specific blogging functions are very neat, everything else is not yet at all a content-management system!

Before I forgot - for everyone digging into the code of Wordpress - this link was very helpful for me: http://phpxref.wordpress-it.it/nav.html?_functions/index.html

Besides the migration of the next blogs (Eventkochbuch and JanZweiNull) I have to decide about the portal approach - the idea is of having one entry point for all the blogs at http://network.kongressmedia.de. The question is whether to set up this under WPMU - means direct access to all the postings - or pulling the content via RSS feeds already into Typo3 at this point. Any suggestions?

• add-from-server
  addthis-sidebar-widget
  add-to-any
  akismet
  blognetworking
  contentboxes
  easy-post-to-post-links
  exec-php
  facelook-bacebook-badge
  get-recent-comments
  lightview-js
  mytwitter
  nofollow-free
  rss-import
  schedule-post
  sideposts
  tag-cloud-widget-for-utw
  tag-this
  tell-a-friend
  twitter-this
  twitter-tools
  UTW3
  widgets
  wp-dopplr
  wp-feed2post

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.