The rumors of a merge between WordPress and WordPress Multiuser began swirling around late May. In June, a lead developer at WordPress MU, Donncha O Caoimh, confirmed the consolidation. And the WordPress community celebrated.

But only briefly. After the announcement, questions of “when?” quickly followed, and for that Mr. O Caoimh had no ready answers.

On Christmas Day, WordPress announced the launch of WordPress 3.0, and with it, the inclusion of WordPress MU.

In a nutshell, the merge of the two WordPress versions means that from 3.0 on, every WordPress installation will be capable of hosting multiple blogs/sites.

Different company employees, for example, could have their own blog — robert.k4media.com, jet.k4media.com, etc — but instead of multiple installs, with multiple databases, admins, etc, everything is in one easy-to-manage code base. Something along these lines might also be useful for a single company with several brands.

Users can have limited permissions for security reasons — no theme or plugin uploads, for example — while the Admin still retains God rights. Or Users too can have Admin privileges.

The merger also means that many cool MU projects, such as BuddyPress, the WordPress MU “social networking” plugin, will soon be available for the masses.

At K4 Media, we recommend WordPress a lot. Not so much as a blogging software, but as a content management system.

• WP is very user-friendly
• WP is designed to be customized (k4media.com runs on WordPress)
• WP’s automatic update process makes staying current easy
• WP is easily extensible with 1000s of plugins
• WP is open source

In recent years, WordPress has evolved into much more that just blogging software. It really is a terrific little CMS, which is why we use and recommend it so much. The move to incorporate MU will only make WordPress that much stronger.