I’m at school full-time this term, but Brian’s still letting me work on some projects at OLT (poor Brian). The one that’s currently causing me the most stress is the “blogfolio” pilot, so naturally, I’m blogging about it.
The other group that has to put up with me is the DiSCORDER team. We’re trying to put together a new website for the CiTR magazine.
DiSCORDER is trying out Wordpress, while the blogfolios pilot group is using MT 3.14. D’Arcy had a post a little while ago comparing weblog systems’ features and scalability(see also the spin-off wiki page). Here are some of my thoughts, with a slightly different take on WP’s and MT’s strengths for non-bloggy blog projects.
Wishlists and (desired) Features/Requirements
These projects are both pretty different, but they both:
DiSCORDER
Blogfolios
What is it good for?
We compared MT before when we were trying to figure out what system to use for weblogs@ubc. In the end, as D’Arcy pointed out, WPmu just wasn’t scalable enough (since it copies tables). But we’re still looking at WP. Why?
1) Wordpress’s user levels work well in some situations.
To be honest, DiSCORDER picked WP because it was free (see Mark Pilgrim’s old post on why Freedom is important). But it also handles user hierarchy really well. In “normal” blogs, this doesn’t tend to be a big issue, but with DiSCORDER, it definitely is. With WP, a user who is level 5 will have the same set of permissions as a user who is level 6, but the user with the higher level can edit the posts of those below him/her.
The User Level system reminds me a little bit of WebCT’s role-based permission system, which people have complained about because in order to get the permissions you want, sometimes you have to assume many “roles” within the system. MT’s checkbox system is more customizable, but for editing a big magazine or newsletter with multiple authors (all with different skill sets, assistant editors, art/web directors, people to talk to, etc.), WP’s hierarchy makes sense.
The hierarchy would also come in handy in a heavily-moderated/professor-guided blogfolio.
2) Wordpress has private entries.
MT doesn’t have this feature. We can do it, sort of, with a snippets of PHP code in the templates, but that takes time. Almost all of the blogfolio users so far have requested a private area where they can control readership. This would be so great if WP scaled better.
I see no problem with DiSCORDER potentially using private entries to track/post progress in meetings though. If they want to, of course.
3) More control over file upload sizes.
Wordpress lets you specify max size of your uploads. MT has a limit of, I think, 1MB. Typical blogs won’t have people uploading huge files, but at least with Wordpress, you have some control over what your staff might be uploading - important when you have a lot of media and you run a music magazine.
I’m making a case for Wordpress…
… using MT. Oh, the irony. We use MT mainly because we’ve found that it scales better than WP. People find it easy to use, and not too problematic. Overall, MT has worked pretty well for our purposes (providing basic blogs and support to users in higher ed).
But each system has its own strengths. If you aren’t looking to run a huge campus-wide blog project, or if you’re a smaller institution/organization and you want to try running a campus newsletter or magazine or portfolio-thing with your team, consider Wordpress. Especially consider WP if your non-bloggy blog requires content moderation by different levels of users, or if you are pressed for cash.
Posted by mitch at 9:33 PM