Plume CMS Part 1: Multiple user blogs…the road to Plume

When my HOD/IT asked about the possibility of teachers having their own pages in Mambo (the CMS that the school is planning to move the school website too), I was intrigued. So I did some searching at Mambers and came across two component projects by the name of

http://pxsystem.sourceforge.net/

MyHomePage and UHP. Without delving into too many details however, I found the two unsuitable: the former was too unnerving (required installation of several separate parts) and would give teachers too much “power”, while the latter was a ittle too limiting for what I needed.

After a few hours of research and test-driving, I was ready to throw in the towel when I came across mention of a WordPress MU (for Multi-UseR) – yes, a derivative of what this blog is running on. :-p Alas, it is still in its early development stages (not to mention version 1.5 of the usual WordPress is in its final development stages, and will probably have implications on WordPress MU), and its installation was quite iffy for me. So I started going through more mature software that would provide similar functionality. In my “journey”, some of the contenders I came across were

• Nucleus CMS which unfortunately didn’t seem to have the ability to give users distinct and separate pages that only they could write on
• b2evolutionis very nice multi-user blogging system but it’s too troublesome to set it up for different users to have their own distinctive ending URL
• Drupal which was so powerful I had problems installing it and figuring out how to do what I wanted with it

And then, a chance visit to
OpensourceCMS focused my attention on Plume CMS, which among other things, purport to have

• multiple websites management from a single installation
• integrated file management
• multiple authors with different rights and websites
• full UTF-8 for non-alphabet based scripts

Installation was quick and easy, and it has a beautiful interface which you can see here .

I am hooked!