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
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.
Anyhting you want to add?
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.
Thank you for this great article!