Picking a Multiuser Blogging System

November 21, 2005 | Filed Under All Stories, Data and Technology

I’m a blogger. I’m also a systems administrator at a University. Thus, when the University decided to charter a project to offer each member of the institution a blog, I was selected to sit on the committee. We boiled all of the software choices down to Drupal, Movable Type, and Wordpress MU.

In my evaluation of these solutions, the software was ranked on a five-point scale against the following requirements, which we had decided were important to us. I’ve also included my personal rankings. In many cases the software received a lower ranking on a feature because it was not customizable by the individual user.

Intuitive Drupal:2 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Skinnable Drupal:2 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Pingbacks Drupal:3 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5
Trackbacks Drupal:2 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Supports XMLRPC Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Comment SPAM blocking Drupal:2 Movable Type:4 Wrodpress MU:5
Image support Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	WYSIWYG Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	RSS feed Support Drupal:3 Movable Type:4 Wrodpress MU:5
TAGS Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	URL Rewriting Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Hosted here Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5
Single installation Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Single Database Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Single Table structure Drupal:5 Movable Type:4 Wrodpress MU:0
Mysql or Oracle Drupal:5 Movable Type:5 Wrodpress MU:5	Integrate with IDM (ex. CAS) Drupal:0 Movable Type:0 Wrodpress MU:0	Quota on file uploads Drupal:5 Movable Type:0 Wrodpress MU:5
Prefer PHP: Drupal:5 Movable Type:1 Wrodpress MU:5	Ease of Upgrade Drupal:4 Movable Type:4 Wrodpress MU:5	Cost Drupal:5 Movable Type:3 Wrodpress MU:5

Totals:
Drupal: 88
Movable Type: 90
Wordpress MU: 100

Drupal came in last not because it is unable to meet the requirements we had listed, but because it is not as intuitive as the other solutions, and there are many areas where the user can not be granted any granularity of control over the blog. There is, for example, no way to allow the individual user to manage comment spam settings. The administrator chooses the settings that are then applied globally to each user on the system.

Movable Type evaluated quite well. The user interface is very nice, and the entire software package is very feature rich from a user experience standpoint. It meets most of our pre-determined criteria, but there are no built in “file upload quotas”, and the application is written in Perl. Also of possible concern is the fact that, while content exists within the database, it is delivered via static pages. This means that a site (all static pages) must be rebuilt whenever significant changes are made, such as changing a theme. It is anyone’s guess how this static / dynamic model will scale to a very large number of users. Also of note is the fact the MT is a pay for product. Like any proprietary software solution, this can be both a benefit and a drawback.

Wordpress MU mets or exceeds all of our pre-determined criteria with one major exception. The database does not have a unified table structure, meaning each blog requires its own set of database tables. It is largely unknown how this model will scale to a large number of users, however wordpress.com has this software successfully rolled out to a large and growing number of users. Should we decided on WPMU, it may be worth discussing the implementation with the WPMU team. The user interface is both elegant and intuitive, and the user retains maximum control over most of the unique blog settings. It is, however, worth mentioning that WPMU has adopted the Web 2.0 standard of not versioning their releases. Upgrades are downloaded via a nightly builds directory, which means that version releases may not be as well tested as with a more traditional release strategy.

For my part, even though I scored it slightly higher, I have no real preference for Wordpress MU over Movable Type. Both are great blogging solutions, and I feel that we could find a way around MT’s lack of file upload quota. I do, however, prefer either of these two solutions over Drupal because of issues surrounding usability, and customization.

In the end, the committee agreed that Wordpress MU was the winner. We will now go on to write the CAS authentication module, and see if we can get around the requirement that usernames have greater than three letters. We are also hoping to get in touch with the wordpress.com people to discuss how the non-unified table structure will scale to 30.000+ users.

Discuss This Article

8 Responses to “Picking a Multiuser Blogging System”

NoSheep! » ecto for Windows Still Blows on December 1st, 2005 11:44 pm #

[...] I guess I still can’t commit to using ecto for windows (in fact I’m not using it on the mac anymore either) The built in Wordpress interface is simple, and for now that continues to win. Truthfully many of the problems I’m experiencing may be attributed more to Wordpress or the underlying APIs, but either way I still can’t use the product. Nor will I be recommending it on campus as we roll out potentially 30,000 blogs… [...]
ryan on January 12th, 2006 9:12 pm #

I am interested in getting my hands on the CAS auth module. Have you written in yet? Can you share?
cliff on January 13th, 2006 10:11 am #

Not yet… We are currently LDAP authenticating. The CAS module is yet to come provided we don’t decide to use cpip instead. I’ll send you an e-mail if, and when we have a CAS module ready.
spiralbound.net » CMS Martix Rocks For Meetings on January 31st, 2006 3:54 pm #

[...] It sucks when you go into a meeting and try to advocate for a piece of software, but people just keep on coming up with obscure questions about random features that may or may not exist. This happened a little while back when we were investigating a campus-wide blogging solution.CMS Matrix sure does make answering questions and comparing products a lot easier. [...]
Ross on February 20th, 2006 11:54 pm #

Did a CAS or LDAP plugin ever come out of this?
Alistair on March 6th, 2006 12:51 pm #

I also work at a University and we are evaluating WPMU right now. I’d like to discuss your progress with LDAP and CAS if you have the chance.
bob stan on November 15th, 2007 6:45 pm #

I am also concerned about the data model used by WPMU. I have found that MySQL requires a significant portion of computing resources. This may not be a problem on a powerful server with RAID 5 and large RAM, but a lot of WPMU installations are on shared servers that quickly get bogged down.

Have you thought about tweaking the MySQL data model?
bish on July 27th, 2008 1:22 am #

Very cool review and evaluation — and just what I’ve been looking for. I can’t mail you directly (the address didn’t jump out and hit me so I missed it) so pardon the spam while I say Thanks a Heap for this post.