Wordpress Multiple Users Blogs Installation Automation

This hub is an answer to exinco's request: How do I setup wordpress so that vistior can create blog via my site?

First of all, I have to say, exinco has done a great job to setup a wordpress blog, and the blog posts are very technical savvy. Now he want to benefit visitors by providing blogging service (free or not?). I think a lot of people who use wordpress may have come up with this idea, How to install multiple users wordpress service, so that visitors can register a account and setup their own blogs?

What we need to do, first of all, is to check out wordpress documentations regarding "Installing Multiple Blogs", you may find everything you need.

WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one.

WordPress MU is ideal for applications like blog networks and newspapers looking to manage multiple blogs from a single installation, enterprise users looking for a large scale blogging solution for intranet deployments, schools and universities who want to offer blogs to all their students and teachers, or individuals looking to host multiple blogs for their families or friends.

Like single-user WordPress, WordPress MU is available for free under the GPL open source license.

Example MU installations include:

• WordPress.com (400k blogs and several million page views per day as of Fall 06)
• Harvard University (free blogs for Harvard faculty and students)

Wordpress.com use subdomain for its users, while Havard University use subdirectories for its faculty and students. Subdomain is a URL such as username.example.com/, while subdirectory is a folder, such as example.com/username. Which one is better? subdomain or subdirectory? I think, subdomains can be a little more difficult for a novice webmaster to set up.

Alternative projects and plugins which provide some level of multi-blogging facility.

Developed by ibiblio.org, Lyceum is a stand-alone multi-user multi-blogging application designed to handle 2 to 2,000,000 blogs.

Utilizing the WordPress blogging engine at its core, Lyceum enables stand-alone, multi-user multi-blog services for small and high-volume environments. At its core, Lyceum is a minimally-featured enhancement to WordPress.

Lyceum lets WordPress do what it does well; we simply added nice things like smart administrative controls, an easy-to-use installer, enterprise-oriented database architecture, support for load-balancing, all the while focusing on flexibility, security and usability.

Lyceum is GPL-licensed, under active development, and free to use. Lyceum currently powers site like TeachFor.Us (Teach For America teachers' blogs).