Disruptive Conversations

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my tasks in my new role with Voxeo is to create a "blogs.voxeo.com" blog portal for the blogs the company will create. Given my interest in open source, I've been investigating options there for a "corporate blog portal". Why open source? Primarily because I'm a huge control-freak and I want to be able to control all aspects of the portal, even if it means diving deep into source code. So my first inclination is to investigate open source options and then if I can't find something there that meets my requirements, I'll move on to commercial software.

On first-glance, though, it would appear that there are two viable open source options out there:

• WordPress MU (Multi-User) - Based on WordPress, this is the "official" multi-user version of WordPress and powers the hosted site WordPress.com.
• Lyceum - Also based on Wordpress and developed by the great folks over at ibiblio.org, this is "a multi-blog derivative of WordPress, suitable for installations with 2 or 2,000,000 blogs. (Nicely, they have a screencast showing the installation process.)

Both options look good. Both let you use the zillion WordPress plugins out there. Both provide front-end portals. Both can be customized to the nth degree. Stay tuned for more analysis... and if any of you reading this have used either of them, I'd appreciate any insight you can offer.

Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, lyceum, voxeo, wordpress, wordpressmu