Blogging Tips

If you’ve got the capacity on your hosting account or dedicated server, then you could offer a number of your visitors, friends, acquaintances, or the general public, their own blog. Why would you do this? It’s your domain, so having others create content on your site can add to the worth of the site. You could also look at offering a small basic blog package for free and then charge for add-ons and space upgrades. Or you could add your own advertising in throughout the site (and have users pay to remove it from their blog).

WordPress MU is the multi-user version of WordPress, used to power WordPress.com and is also available for anyone else to download. It is virtually the same as using WordPress with a few extra features, so if you’re already used to that then the change is barely noticeable.

WordPress MU will create a blog for the frontend site, and will work and operate like a single version of WordPress does. When you create a second blog, this will either become like a directory on your domain eg. yourdomain.com/newblog/ or a subdomain ie. newblog.yourdomain.com. As the main administrator, when you log in you’ll see the standard menus to maintain your own site, plus a new menu called Site Admin.

In the Site Admin you can manage existing blogs and users, and add new blogs and users. You can control which themes are available to everyone and edit a specific blog to only allow that access to certain themes too. You can also control how much space each user has for their uploads folder and increase an individual’s space if necessary.

You should find that every standard theme will work with WordPress MU (standard meaning not a theme that relies on specific plugins being available), as WordPress MU uses the same theming engine as the single version does. Most plugins should also work with MU although it is advised to perhaps keep a test install somewhere to try the plugin on first. If the plugin is designed to allow you to add information to your site then you will need to ensure it can work for multiple blogs and keep each user’s content and information separate.

From a technical point of view, there is only one set of files used to power the whole of MU. You have your wp-admin, wp-includes and wp-content folders, along with the root files, just how the single version has them. Under wp-content you have a blogs.dir directory, which then has a directory for every blog added, listed by blog ID. Under there is the files directory where the blog’s uploaded files are kept. You also get an mu-plugins directory and a plugins directory. The first allows you to put plugins in and these are automatically enabled for each blog and cannot be disabled. The second directory takes plugins like usual, and the user can enable them if they want to.

The more complicated area is within the database. For every blog created, a set of tables are created to hold the information for that blog. MU doesn’t really have a limit on how many blogs can be added (WordPress.com have over 2 million!), however the constraints on your server will need to be considered.

If you’ve thought about offering a few friends a blog on your site, or perhaps offering hosted blogs to the public, then WordPress MU is certainly worth looking at.