Back in the mists of time I remember listening to an old boss of mine raving on about this incredible Norwegian online news site that were doing amazing things with blogs.

Specifically, they were publishing MMS photos of the Boxing Day Tsunami, direct to their blogs, which were then forming a core component of their coverage of the disaster.

So, when they came to Incsub to talk about migrating over 34,000 blogs from their (very old) custom ‘Petrograd’ system to WordPress MU, including reproducing and massively enhancing that functionality, naturally we couldn’t have been more excited.

As we mentioned, MMS functionality was a core component of the dev, and you can view all the latest MMS posts in one easy location:

However, of equal importance was a moderation system that allowed administrators at VG Nett to view and post moderate all uploaded images, published MMS components, embedded video content, comments and pages.

And we made that for them too – here’s an idea of the level of complexity involved (just click on the thumbnail below):

But we didn’t stop there either – every blog has a ‘master theme’ that can be converted into almost any style of theme that the user likes, just from the theme options.

Site-wide ratings also allow admins (and users) to show top rated posts from across the site or from individual blogs with ease.

And, of course, all of this integrates and hooks in with VGs extensive registration and authentication system – meaning new users not only have to jump through the usual hoops, but also enter in security codes they receive via SMS.

All in all, it’s a massive and, we like to think, very impressive, project that showcases the power of WordPress MU to be used in a major media site.