WordPress MU with Anca Mosiou (December 2009)

What is it?

• The platform that runs WP.com
• One install, multiple blogs
• Single administrator for all blogs & comments
• Quick way to build community site (if you want a social network, add BuddyPress)
• One database holds the content for all the blogs
• Shared user options, etc.

How it Works

• Theme library (for all sites)
• Site-wide plugins (only loaded for the plugins that use them)
• User manager (can create blogs when you add users, or not)
• Blog admin (creates new blogs)
• Not all hosting providers support WPMU (processor intensive)
• Subdomains (this requires a chat with your web host)

Individual Blogs in WPMU

• Dashboard (same as regular WP)
• Posts
• Pages
• Widgets
• Themes (frameworks with child themes work best). Find WPMU themes at http://www.wordpress.org/extend/themes/search.php?q=mu
• Plugins Find WPMU plugins at http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=mu
• Options
• Users

Useful Plugins

Sitewide Tags: aggregates all posts in certain categories from all the blogs in your MU install

LDAP Authentication—lets you log in with your existing network password

MU Resources

Forum: http://mu.wordpress.org
Showcase: http://wordpress.org/showcase/flavor/wordpress-mu/

Questions and Tips

Lenore: Why would you set up MU versus a wiki? Wikis are tools for collaborative editing; blogs are tools for managing time-based data, but aren’t as good for collaborating. Wikis are also better for creating an end product. Forums and bulletin boards are better for pure discussion. Blogs are good for organizing information in a predictable hierarchy. Wikis advertise changes; blogs don’t. WP can pull in RSS feeds from wikis or anything else.

Sabahat: How to get Flickr to post to blog? Flickr has a post-to-blog feature. There are also some Flickr-related plugins listed from our meetup on slideshows.

More images: Zemanta plugin suggests images and gives credits correctly. Note that its suggestion algorithm is not perfect, and that many people don’t name or tag their images properly.

Mari wants to know whether it’s legal for her to have a designer change her single-user copy of Thesis. (Yes.) She’s also confused about issues with downloading and uploading the files. It’s something people here can do for her or show her. (Lou Anne suggests she just trade cooking for help.)

We digress into the pros and cons of GoDaddy as a hosting service.