WordPress MU

Standard WP has it's online manual, but for the life of me I cannot find any such thing on this site for MU. Am I just missing where it is? Or do we just load MU and figure it out once up? I'd like to read a manual to know what I'm going to have to do right after I install it? I don't even know what the front page will look like and so can't even think about what I'll do with it, for example.

If no manual, any tutorials anywhere else on the web?

Nope.

It has the same default themes as WP. Theoretically, you don't have to "do" anything once it's installed. I mean, you could add some themes and plugins, but if it installs okay and you've got it running, people can sign up right away.

Anything you'd want to change would just be your own personal choice. There's *some* difference between regular WP and WPMU, but as far as looks and things you'd want to do when you first get it running - well, not much difference between it and WP, AFAIC.

So the themes all have a sign up link? "Sign up for a blog!" type of thing?

As people sign up for blogs and create posts, how do they display by default? Intermixed?

Are the various blogs shown in the sidebar by default?

These are the type of questions that I have.

Sounds like I need a developer for getting it right. Is there a list of developers that specialize in MU?

First thing I would do is explore the software. Sounds like you haven't really even used it yet.

I added a signup link to the meta widget as well as each theme in teh sidebar.php just in case they didn't use widgets.

the different blgos are all seperate. (ie subdomains and subdirectories.)

Are there any web hosts that cater to MU installs? Sounds like that would be a plus.

Cater? No.

Shared hosting is highly discouraged.

I'd like to test out the software without going live, without having to buy a new web hosting plan. I am allowed "addon" domains at my web host now (LivingDot.com). Would I be able to load the software in an add-on domain just to try it and look at the admin and such, or would it not even install on such an account?

In my experience, MU doesn't even work on an add-on domain.

The admin looks pretty much exactly the same as WP, except there's a few menus for the SiteAdmin, and there's no theme editor or plugin editor.

If that domain has its own root directory, it should be OK.

As a note, most shared hosting providers do not allow software like MU to be installed. It requires a lot of resources, and loads down a shared hosting environment.

Many hosts don't realize it yet, but there has been a turn around as of late where more and more are changing their TOS so that software like this can't be installed.

If you're testing it out just to play with it, and want to use the subdomain method, make sure the host will support both wildcard DNS records, and will make an edit to your apache virtual host container to support wildcards subdomains as well.

well reselling or giving out accounts out of a shared host account is what teh issue that I've seen.

And I've seen even reseller accounts, or ones where docs clearly stated you could give accounts to friends and family were disallowing MU. (resource issue is the reason there...)

Ahh...got it.

Hey, is there an installation of WPMU anywhere that people can try out, like opensourcecms (or something like that) does for CMS's. I just want to look at it all before buying an account and installing.

No. If you want to try it out, just install it locally on your machine to play with.

If you need help with setting it up locally, there are plenty of topics around here on that.