Wim Mostrey Engaging Drupal

It's been two years since Wordpress MU got released. In my review of the product it became obvious that Wordpress MU provided end-users with all the user-friendliness of a regular Wordpress installation, but that the engine that ties the different blogs was an ugly duck. I also had to admit that Drupal 4.7 was not the perfect solution for multi-user blogging either. In these two years the Wordpress MU engine hasn't changed much but four other software packages didn't stand still.

Lyceum

A Wordpress MU spin-off was created that goes by the name of Lyceum. Its biggest change is the database scheme: it doesn't create a couple of tables for each blog the way Wordpress MU does, but uses a fixed number of tables for the entire system. If you're comfortable with Wordpress and like the way it works, then I would definitely recommend Lyceum over Wordpress MU.

Elgg

Elgg seems to have dropped the "education" tagline. Instead of niching social software for education, it now offers itself as "an open, flexible social networking engine". Although it doesn't only focus on multi-user blogging it is worth checking out.

Drupal

Drupal advanced two complete versions and has matured even more. A great plus is the addition of installation profiles in Drupal 5. This allows us to provide a multi-user blog installation profile, which is exactly what I'm aiming for with...

DrupalMU

Being both excited and nervous I'm launching drupalmu.org as a showcase of the DrupalMU installation profile. Please note that this is not a new social networking site, it is purely for testing and development purposes. Everyone is free however to create an account, start blogging and provide feedback. Bug reports, support questions and feature requests can be posted on the DrupalMU issue queue while discussions are welcome at the Multi-user blogging group.

Here's a list of contributed modules that are currently being used:

• Blogtheme
• BUEditor
• Pathauto
• Token (required by Pathauto)
• User Comment (which I upgraded to Drupal 6 myself for DrupalMU)

And these themes:

• aBeesParadise
• AD The Morning After
• Alek 2.0

I'm also using Mollom to protect against user registration and comment spam but I'm not sure if it will be integrated in the installation profile since it requires registering a key first. The main reason I'm not using FCKeditor or TinyMCE as an editor is because that would also require extra software to be downloaded and deployed and I want to keep the installation profile as simple as possible.

What is currently missing is a monthly archive per user (for which I hope to use views2) and a simple method for users to create their own blocks, for instance with "About me" information or a blogroll. All this is being discussed at the Multi-user blogging group. I'm still in process of creating the actual installation profile so the first version will probably be ready once these two functionalities are implemented.