Multiblogs and WP

[kenwalker]

Hey Matt–I’m in the process of evaluating a CMS for our church to use. I’m this close *holds fingers an inch apart* to buying an MT non-commercial license, for the sole reason that MT supports multiple blogs. This would let us build a site with multiple site sections, much like what the inimitable Doug Bowman is doing with StopDesign.
Is this feature on the roadmap for WP in the near future?

[kenwalker]

Er–bad cut and paste job. This question is open to anyone. 😉

[Matt Mullenweg]

Ken, while multiple blogs as done in MT isn’t slated for our upcoming 1.3 release, you will be able to elegantly address problems of content management in addition to blog management. Rather than encouraging people to use different blogs (or different categories) for tasks better suited to a non-post-based system, we’re adding “pages” functionality in 1.3. What this means is instead of Doug’s method of creating a weblog for your about pages and a weblog for your portfolio ad infinitum you can say “I want a page at /about/ that uses my common header and footer plus this template.” We’ve found that people find this page-based approach much more intuitive then the MT content management approaches commonly used. If you sign up for the beta or announcement mailing lists you can receive notification when we go into public beta or when 1.3 is released.

[zbrob]

That’s pretty neat. I didn’t switch to 1.2 because I hacked and edited 1.0.2 too much, but this is a reson to do switch when 1.3 is released.

[Narada]

I have two questions. (1) How can I get on the beta list? Is that the same as the announcement list below? (2) Can I sample this functionality that allusion talks about now? Do current nightlies have this functionality. Also, lastly, where can I find out more about what new features 1.3 will have other than what’s mentioned on the wordpress.ord/development page? Many thanks.