The largest Swiss student community site students.ch is now offering blogs for all its 40'000 members for free. And all based on a stripped down and enhanced Flux CMS.

Stripped down as they ā€œonlyā€ can blog new posts, manage galleries, old posts, blog links and comments. The rest of the functionality of Flux CMS (like static pages, contact forms, etc) was removed. But they still have all the features of the blog (nested and multiple categories, tags, comments, spam protection, moblogging, XML-RPC blogging, etc) and gallery plugin.

It's an enhanced version as they are the first, which will use our revamped blog editor. They can manage their galleries, blogroll, files, posts and comments from within the blog editor. Therefore we could remove the Navi Tree in the admin, as it is now a fully functional blog tool without that.

But the real beauty IMHO is the full integration in the students.ch site. Even though the blogs run on their own server in our datacenter, they are seamlessly integrated in the students.ch pages. No iframes or other nasty workaround, but single-sign-on for the members. This means they can directly blog from their usual admin area without having to log in a second time. And most people won't even realize that the blog and its admin run somewhere else as the admin is also within the students.ch layout. Additionally, we do not handle the user-data (password, email) on our server, but handle that through the students.ch servers. This avoids synchronization issues and should guarantee for a smooth operation.

There's of course also a planet students.ch for a quick overview what's going on. As it only started today officially, you won't find much more than test posts there right now :)