Wordpress MU experiment
Jul 18th, 2008 | By knup | Category: My Feature, Wordpress, knupNET SitesSo managing a network or several network of sites that contain multiple Wordpress blogs is very tedious. Let’s take my USportsNetwork for example. This site currently has 20 or so sites in it and I’m in the process of increasing this to 100 or so. That’s 20 individual Wordpress installs. Which means every time there is a Wordpress upgrade, I have to upgrade them all. Yikes! I have to upload plugins to each site, manage FTP accounts for each and so on. Enter Wordpress MU…
Wordpress MU (Multiple User) is basically an extension of Wordpress. It’s like 90% Wordpress code with a layer on top for managing multiple sites. I figured I would give this a shot for one of my networks and see how it goes. If all goes well - I will convert some of my other networks over to Wordpress MU.
I’ve converted about 15 sites over currently and hopefully over the next week will have the entire USN running on one Wordpress MU install. So far…
Advantages:
- VERY easy to spin up a new blog/site. Just a matter of clicks.
- Plugins all managed in one central areas and you can activate them on a site by site basis. Very nice.
- These blogs all share a common Users table. Very cool! One account that can login and manage them all. Once I get real good at this it will be great. Users will need one account to comment on any of my sites! Nice!
- Few accounts created on the server - though I do create a “parked” domain for the new sites.
- One database! Easier to manage.
Bad things:
- Possible SEO issues? I’m not sure about this but I’m wondering how Google and others will handle my sites. Will they see them the same as they did?
- Wordpress MU has some issues with adding a new site with a NEW domain. It’s built perfectly for subdomains. But with some tweaks and a plugin it does the trick. I think
- Speed? Will my sites run slower? Database bogged down since it’s one database? Not sure!
That’s about it for now. Any of you ever ran Wordpress MU? I’ll continue to report my findings as I plunge forward.
I think using WordPress multi-user (mu) is an excellent choice, Knup. As far as being able to hold up under larger networks, if I am not mistaken, isn’t Mu what powers WordPress.com with all those thousands and thousands of blogs? Anyway, the thought of using Mu comes to me just about every week or so now, with WordPress updates and new and cool plugins rolling out frequently. The idea of taking care of all (my few) blogs from one central point is ceretainly appelaing.
it is what holds up wordpress.com and a lot of other HUGE ass networks however they have many points of redundancy and load balancing built into their network infrastructure that will stop the sluggish behavior of a database and eliminate points of failure.
Yay! Interesting.
This was literally exactly what I was looking for. Each Wordpress update is a headache, plugins, etc…. I could go on and on with the wasted hours I have dealt with uploading, and updating, and keeping all the blogs up to date. Thank you so much.
Oh awesome, this is something I could definently use on my blog. Are you sure it is as easy as you say? Because I really hope it is considering I am not the most experience blog creator. I still consider myself a bit of a newbie when it really comes down to it. I have added some widgets lately so I hope this won’t conflict with them. Thanks again!
WOW… This is vary interesting.. Thanks for posting this..