Introduction

LifeType is a open source blogging platform. It has been around since 2003 but have never really cought any attention because of the bigger more dominant blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger. It is mostly used as a private blog platform kind of CMS that has all you could ever wish for when you are looking for a pretty standard blog tool.

However, Lifetype cought my attention now recently when I was in search for another CMS that offered multi-user support and the ability for users to register and create an own blog on a subdomain.  I'm tired of Wordpress in general so Wordpress MU was out of the question.

First Impression

It took some time and a installation or two to really figure out how LifeType worked. The installation process is very easy. The biggest problem as I saw it was that when the installation is finished. You have basically no idea what to do next. Things like settigns and configurations are spread out across different submenus, there is no real thread or simplicity like in Wordpress MU. Directly after the installation you're provided with a default blog. This will become your homepage. But if your trying to build a multi-user system like me, there's no use of that default blog. It doesn't even provide you with a register link! 

The tricky part I had to learn was that there was a page called summary.php. This should be you homepage, it has it all; recent posts, new blogs, active blogs, register link and login form. You can of course set this to with a simple line in your .htaccess. 

Things like this makes it a little bit harder to learn, because there's no real documention either.

Setting Up Your Multi-User Site

Turning LifeType into a multi-user platform can be done by first enabling other users to create accounts. This can be done by flipping the switch under Administration > Global Settings > Summary. Users can now register, but be sure to allow them to create blogs so check the permissions for regular users to see if they can create blogs.

One important thing is to enable the creation of subdomains. This can be done by setting a wildcard DNS on your domain. I wont go into that more here, but just do that and check that you have set up your settings so users can create subdomains in your configuration settings.

There's a lot of options to consider depending on how you want your site, but some things I recommend is to fix the URLs by choosing Custom URLs under Global Settings > URLs and then fixing the permalink setting to look more appealing.

Templating And Default Templates

LifeType hasn't got the biggest community out there and you can notice by comparing the templates made for LifeType compared to Wordpress, maybe that's a bit unfair. But anyway you should expect to work a lot with hacking the default templates from LifeType.

Support

I encountered some errors while working with my blogsite, most of them could be found by searching the LifeType Support Forums or Google.

Conclusion

LifeType is a very lightweight blogplatform that can be very effecient when yo have learned to handle it. My final result can be found on Blogg.asia when I'm finished with it.