Behind The Blog

When I began work for Voxeo in late October, one of my first projects was to build the blog portal you are now reading. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great amount of information out on the web about how to build a corporate blog portal on a technical level. I’d been writing and podcasting about this (also here) back in early 2007 and still hadn’t seen much in the way of great information. There are certainly services out there and a number of companies that will build these kind of portals for you. But, admittedly, some of us are “control freaks” and want to be able to control all aspects of the blog site - and are willing to put in the time to do so.

In early November 2007, I created a “Corporate Blog Portal” section of The New PR Wiki to try to summarize some of the information I had to date and to collect pointers to various software packages out there to develop these kind of portals. It seemed to me that for an open source solution, it really came down to three choices:

• WordPress MU (Multi-User) - the Wordpress-derived software that powers WordPress.com
• Lyceum - also WordPress-derived, developed by the folks at ibiblio.org
• Apache Roller - Java-based multi-user blog server used by blogs.sun.com, IBM, others

I should point out that our interest in evaluating open source software first was not as much about cost as it was about, again, control. We wanted the ability to tweak and modify the system so that it works with our other systems. For instance, traffic to the blog is now integrated into our centralized traffic tracking system for all our websites - a hack that we did because we could see all the source code and modify it. Had we been unable to find an open source solution that worked for us, we would certainly have proceeded on to evaluate the commercial options out there.

As I described in my external blog post, I ultimately chose WordPress MU to build this site, primarily because it provided the ability to use “tags” to generate “tag clouds” and was closest to the current WordPress release.

Having said that, if you’ve heard the (very) old joke about “what if operating systems were airlines?“, choosing to use “open source” is very often like getting a box of parts and having to figure out what to do with them all. Our experience with WordPress MU definitely had shades of that. It would seem that WPMU is really best designed for someone looking to create a site like Wordpress.com with hosted blogs. If you want to create a site like that, the installation is fairly straightforward and you’ll be up and running quickly.

However, if you want a “corporate blog portal”, such as what we have on blogs.voxeo.com, well… you’ve got a box of parts. Figure it out.

So we did… where “we” is myself and my colleague Rick. Rick is the one behind our other websites of www.voxeo.com and evolution.voxeo.com and is also the creator of this stunning (in my opinion!) Wordpress theme we are using. He’s the CSS guru and the one who did a lot of MySQL hackery. I’m the one working with plugins, writing content and otherwise administering the site.

This blog, then, is our attempt to give back a bit to the WPMU community and to share some of the lessons we’ve learned - and will continue to learn - as we use WordPress MU for a corporate blog portal. We’re going to be documenting some of the errors we made - and how we fixed them. We’ll talk about some of the modifications we had to make. Rick had to do some fine PHP/MySQL hacking to get our main blogs.voxeo.com page to show the last 5 entries across all of our (public) blogs - we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about plugins we add and what we did or didn’t do to make them work. We’ll also use this blog as a way to document some of what we do and how improve the site.

It’s our hope that through doing this there may be others out there who will build their blog portals with WordPress MU and through collective information sharing we can all wind up building better sites. Feel free to ask questions… we’ll answer if we can. Join us in our journey…

Tags: WPMU "Blog portal"

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