We’re pleased to offer locally installed WordPress blogs as an alternative publishing method for University of Melbourne users.
Our blogging tool, WordPress MU, lets us centrally handle a lot of the management tasks like upgrades, stats, themes, spam control and plugins, leaving you to get on with writing your content.
With simplicity come constraints, but if you find that WordPress MU doesn’t do everything you need, we can upgrade you to a stand-alone WordPress install, or even migrate you into the CMS.
In most cases though, we’d recommend just getting started this way and seeing where it takes you in the longer run.
Question about your themes – if a department wanted their own theme that you don’t offer, how can this be done? Can you set it up so that we have control over the look and feel of our blog?
We haven’t set blogs.unimelb up with the ability for blog owners to add or edit themes, however, we (site admin) can install themes and make them available to certain blogs. For the greatest compatibility, themes should be based on the same ‘Sandbox’ framework and use CSS to control the look and feel.
Managing more variations increases the complexity of managing and maintaining the blogs site, so we do charge for design/build/maintenance as appropriate, the fact sheet on this page gives an outline of what’s available and what to expect http://www.web.unimelb.edu.au/tools/blogs
Can you recommend a particular wordpress plugin to reduce spam ?
Regards
Roy.
Roy, for me, there is only one choice: Akismet. It’s brilliant.
Question about your themes – if a department wanted their own theme that you don’t offer, how can this be done? Can you set it up so that we have control over the look and feel of our blog?
We can upload a custom theme for blog-owners on request.