UPDATE: Since there seeems to be some serious interest in this topic, I've started a wiki page to compare the packages.
I'm starting to toss some more ideas around for a proposal to kickstart a weblogs@ucalgary.ca project. Ideally, the system would be able to integrate via LDAP to the university's authentication system, so people wouldn't have Yet Another Login to remember. It should also scale to thousands of weblogs.
There are several software candidates I'd like to test a bit more before moving forward: (in no particular order)
- Roller Weblogger (used by Sun for their enterprise weblogs)
- Drupal. It's good,
but I absolutely hate the way it publishes its urls. They are absolutely meaningless, exposing primary keys right in the URL. Try reading one of these URLs over the phone, or remembering one...and it's relatively straightforward to expose proper, meaningful URLs. - Bryght - based on Drupal, but nicer. Same URL issue, though
- WordPress MU: MultiUser. I really like it, and it appears to be LDAP-able, but it's acting up on my laptop for some reason.
- MovableType Also nice. Not a huge fan of having to generate every entry as a bunch of static files, though...
- Blosjom (bundled with MacOSX 10.4 Server)
- Blosxom (lightweight perl system) (ISP Hosting plugin)
- others?
And no, there isn't an existing weblogs@ucalgary.ca project (what's up with that?), and I'm not heading one up (but am willing to do so if need be). I just want to get my shit together so I can put an informed proposal together when I get the time.
I've been thinking about this for a long time now (even tried to provide some services on the Learning Commons webserver, but that never took off for anyone but myself :-) ). It was pretty much sparked into the forefront by the NorthernVoice conference, and the Academic Weblogs session in particular.
UPDATE: I've set up a test install of Drupal 4.5 to try it out. It seems pretty impressive, but I may decide to turn off some of the bells and whistles so noobs don't get too freaked out...