wordpress mu vs lifetype

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this is based on my experience setting up gobloglah.com to offer free blog hosting to users. here's some features compared:
  • first and most important (for me) is spam protection. my lifetype installation killed by spam because i cannot globbally enable spam protection for all user. while, most users care nothing more than blogging and do not know how to protect themselves from spam comment. with wpmu, you can globally enable spam protection for all users at once. so no worry about users forget or dont know how to enable spam protection.
  • installation of wpmu takes less than 1 minute. simple and straight forward. everything works out of the box. even subdomain for each blog and nice SEO url enabled by default. i installed lifetype at least 10 minutes messing up with config files and not to count messing up .htaccess which take quite some tweak to make subdomain works.
  • plugins. as with spam protection plugins, in lifetype, most other plugins must be setup in per user bases. in wpmu, you can setup plugins for all users at once. and wordpress already have dozens of great plugins and many of them works flawlessly on wpmu
  • users' own domain. wpmu allow users to have their blog in their own domain name. it's not yet officially released as wpmu plugin, but i bet they will, in near future.
  • front page. wpmu default frontpage only display latest site news from admin and latest updated blog. lifetype default can let you see latest post, most active, etc... off course you can tweak wpmu to do that, but it takes more work.
  • ping. lifetype allow you setup where to ping for updated blog.
  • pingback & trackback in wpmu is all automatic.
  • delayed post. schedule when you want your post to be published.
  • interface. most users already familiar with wp interface. it takes me sometimes to get used to lifetype dashboard. and many past users in lifetype have trouble posting blog after they're registered.
  • it is possible to import your old blog to wpmu.
  • export your links in OPML

Comments

Anonymous said…
It is true that some people have trouble setting up LifeType. I never understand what the problem is. It works out of the box for all installations I have worked on. Sometimes I have to remove the Options lines from .htaccess if the host doesn't allow that. But, it is pretty easy to diagnose that, since Apache reports the error, "Options... not allowed here".

I think you have missed most of the features in LifeType. As you state a number of things that are in (or coming) in Wordpress, and they have already been in LifeType for a while (years, in some cases).

But, to each his own.
7:47 PM
Anonymous said…
I run blogs with both wordpress and lifetype and (of course) both platforms have some positive and some negative aspects. WPs dashboard is a bit more straight forward and (especially with another theme installed) easier to use; but this got better over time in lifetype. Way better in WP are plugins and available themes (even though SOME lifetype plugins still don't exist for WP, like the very simple tagcloud plugin). What I like much more in lifetype is the actual user interface to write a post, which works better than in WP. All the rest for me seems to be more or less the same in everyday use (and gets even nearer with every new version).
7:35 PM
Anonymous said…
Just a quick question. If setting up WPMU is so great (and my experience is that it is any other than a robust, mature piece of software), then how come I am getting 403s from your Wonderful WPMU site?

Anyhting you want to add?
12:14 AM
dennyhalim.com said…
setting up is one thing.
keep it running is another...

my host said wpmu is using so much cpu resources so that they have to disable it.

still trying to work out this issue.
11:38 AM
Anonymous said…
It cannot be denied, the WordPress codebase looks like a rat's nest in comparison with LifeType's.
6:18 AM
Anonymous said…
Hello! I read this article! Big thanks to author, very interesting. Write more.
9:12 PM
Anonymous said…
I was on the fence on this topic until reading this article, but judging by the comments WPMU seems like a bandwidth hog that I will be staying away from. I am on a shared server and am most certain the host would not appreciate me killing all of their cpu bandwidth loading a blog network on their system. My vote is for LifeType.

Thank you for this great article!
10:19 PM
Uncleche said…
Though I don't know lifetype, I bet Wordpress MU is unique and just a boss on its own.
6:02 PM
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