WordPress is one of the simplest self-hosted blogging platforms around, but working with multisite is a different beast altogether. Sure, there are a few online guides and tutorials, but this is just one of those things you should really read up on before diving in.
Mika Epstein, one of the top volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums, has just published WordPress Multisite 101, a pay-what-you-want eBook available in EPUB and PDF formats. The suggested donation for the book is $5, but depending on how useful you find it, there’s nothing stopping you from sending $10, $20, maybe even $100, or the inevitable nothing if that’s how you roll. The book covers everything from getting started to running your own network, and you will always have the forums if you need further assistance.
multisite is great, for creating a network of quality wordpress blogs its great but i have to admit the only bad thing is its kinda tricky to implement for newbies.
Using multisite really helps manage a large network of blogs, its great if you want to set up smaller niche blogs on your own main domain name.
The truth is that multi-site was much easier under the older WPMU (especially v2.9.2) – a lot of useful stuff got complex or ripped out with WP3.0
My viewpoint is that at v3.0.0 WordPress standalone and WPMU should have forked even further than they already had, rather than merging. At the time I was all for the merge, but with a couple of years of hindsight, I wish they’d stayed separate.
The only reason I disagree is that more people pay attention to Multisite now. It’s not all on the shoulders on one person, which is probably a relief to Donncha.
Flip side, it’s still the red-headed stepchild :/ Not as many people work on it, and I wish they’d do a Multisite specific upgrade to fix things like switching the main blog (it’s a hassle, but you CAN do it), removing the /blog/ slug, and other little tweaks. Oh and the /blogs.dir/.
The bad old days will always find nostalgia in my heart..
I wont go into the politics of the integration of mu, but It did effectively move the control of mu into the hands of the wordpress community (and by this I mean the automattic following) and away from the paid membership groups that had offered support and mu tailored solutions. I think of this as a bad thing, wordpress is a wonderful community project, but multi site has been for the most part embraced by commercial interests. As I run a business using mu, I appreciated the differentiation in the community that ment a little money, for some solid support and solid code.
If i only say one thing about the merge, I do appreciate that amateur plugin developers are now away of multi site, and that their plugins should at least place nicely amongst the larger playground..
This is great. I’ve worked with Drupal multi-site configs for a long time and have been looking for a good guide for doing the same thing with WordPress. $5 is good deal.