What software should I use for a collaborative blog?

August 14, 2008 6:21 AM

I want to set up a collaborative blog with some colleagues. What software should we use? I'm not entirely averse to dealing with hosting and so on, but would prefer something that works "out of the box" or even better, is a free service.

Needs: Login for specified users, probably less than 10 but maybe a few more. The ability to have specific "about us" pages for each user (although one "about us" page with a load of A NAME refs would do fine). Customisable layout. That's about it.

posted by handee to computers & internet (6 comments total)

WordPress MU would be just the ticket -- that's what it was made for (the MU stands for "Multi-User") and it's apparently reasonably easy to set up.

I haven't used MU personally, but I'm a WordPress fan, and with the help of WordPress for Dummies I've gone from a total newbie to a relatively decent messer-arounder. If you set yourself up with MU and spent a couple of minutes every day going through the Codex, it shouldn't be that hard to get a handle. on.
posted by Shepherd at 6:33 AM on August 14, 2008

Wordpress MU is really more of a multi-blog tool than a collaborative blog tool. A regular Wordpress blog supports multiple authors just fine. Buy a $5 dollar a month hosting account somewhere that has automatic Wordpress installation and you'll be blogging in about 10 minutes.
posted by COD at 6:47 AM on August 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

Agreed with wordpress. Just give everyone their own login, and things should work swimmingly. Uses the 'Pages' for your About Me's
posted by deezil at 7:25 AM on August 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

WordPress MU is better at giving each user their own blog than at having a bunch of contributors all collaborate on a single blog. I work with the Movable Type team, but even if I didn't, I think most people familiar with the platform think it's great at these kinds of group blogs. You can grab it for free on the site, and it's probably a little harder to install than WordPress, but a lot easier to manage these kinds of group blogs with. The latest version also automatically does profiles for authors and has much better security than WordPress so that you're not having to install security updates constantly or worry about getting hacked. You can do Pages, too, if you prefer to do author profiles that way.
posted by anildash at 8:24 AM on August 14, 2008

WordPress MU might be overkill depending on what you're trying to set up. For a basic collaborative blog (a single blog with more than one author), a vanilla WP install will work just fine. Wordpress provides for the creation of any number of static pages, for which you can create one bio page for each author.

If you want to be able to sort posts by author, a standard author credit tag on each post will link to a page aggregating all that author's posts.

There are plugins for providing fine-grained privilege controls, so that for example everybody on the roster has authorial privileges but only one or two people have the authority to make posts publicly viewable.
posted by ardgedee at 9:53 AM on August 14, 2008

What about 21publish.com?
posted by nimsey lou at 11:59 AM on August 14, 2008