I said I'd share what I've done in setting up ucalgaryblogs.ca, and instead of waiting for The Mother of All Blog Posts, I'm going to break it up into a few parts. In Part 1, I'll talk about some of the mu-plugins I added. Some are really cool, some are just shiny...
Basically, start with a fresh copy of WordPress Multiuser. I'm running 2.6 on ucalgaryblogs.ca. Then, add the following bits into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.
List-All
A great plugin that provides an extra tag to embed on pages to list all blogs in a WPMU installation. Good for a blog service directory..
MU-Admin-Bar
Adds a bar to the top of every page of every blog, similar to WordPress.com, to make it easy to manage a site and log into the service.
WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages
Donncha's awesome plugin to essentially aggregate every blog into a single überblog so archives and tag clouds can be shared. At first, I thought this was a silly way to do it - Drupal could have easily just displayed tag clouds and archives with no pre-aggregation, but it works, and it works very well.
Sitewide Feed
Generates combined feeds for all posts, comments, and pages posted to the WPMU service. Makes it easy to keep up to date on all activity. I'm guessing/hoping this will become essentially useless once the service takes off - I can't imagine following hundreds of blogs/comments once they become active...
I've got a few more miscellaneous mu-plugins installed, but I may be yanking them as they're really not critical and I want to keep the amount of loaded code down...
Next up: Part 2 - the "main" theme (including home page, sidebar, archives, tag cloud, etc...)