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mu advantages (9 posts)

  1. expaand
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    I am trying to understand the advantages mu has over multiple versions of regular wp.

    It is clear to me that it's real advantage is if you want to have a single domain, and allow each of your users to create their own blog within that domain (or, even, subdomains).

    Our requirements are a bit different:

    1. We want many different sites, each with a completely different domain

    2. We want it to be "easy" to administer the sites: includes install, updates, plugins.

    3. We would like to give the user of each site a way to at least configure their own skin.

    For such a situation, is it better to use mu? Or just a bunch of
    plain wordress installs? What are the advantages/disadvantages of either approach?

    Thankyou.

  2. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 16 years ago #

    I owuld use a bunch of seperate WP installs, unless you are talking about more than a couple dozen. The amount of work to get MU to do what you want it to do is more than the time it take sot whip up a few stand-alone WP installs.

  3. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Agreed, Andrea.

    Although another idea would be my multiple domain hack.

    All your plugins will work, you keep the same databases (and settings, and all that jazz), and did I mention all your plugins will work too?

    Pick a directory, install the latest version of WP, add all the domains as parked for the main domain, and you should be in business.

    In a nutshell, of course.

    If you have multiple installs right now, you can move their tables over to the same DB, or keep them separate. Whichever you prefer.

    My original "hack" set it up based on different table prefixes, but you could easily move some things around and make it also use different login information as well.

    To be honest, if you're managing several WP sites but not a massive "blog farm", this is a better approach as it still gives you a main benefit of MU (single set of files to upgrade/manage), but it still retains full functionality and compatibility of WP and all its plugins/themes/etc.

    There "may" be a few minor hiccups with this set-up though.

    Like upload paths, wp-cache, etc.

    That can be fixed by separating paths, and making it something like wp-content/domain-name/uploads/ or something.

    It isn't a perfect "hack", but it would work with a lot less effort overall than trying to get MU to play fair with everything. Which, may or may not be a big mess depending on plugins, themes, etc.

  4. expaand
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    lunabyte, I read about your hack and I think I understand it (in principal, I haven't tried it). With a few tweaks, you basically fool a single version of wordpress to process requests for a multitude of separate domains.

    If its true you can create a multi-user version of wordpress by a fairly simple hack like this, then what are the advantages to mu? I certainly see the disadvantages:

    1. it is a fork/branch from the main wordpress code, so it lags, and there may be support/update issues
    2. since it is "different" from wordpress, some plugins/themes may not work
    3. community is not as large
    4. everyone seems to suggest it is a bear to get running correctly...

    Anyway, thanks for your responses.

  5. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    "With a few tweaks, you basically fool a single version of wordpress to process requests for a multitude of separate domains."

    Pretty much, although "technically" you're just pointing it to a different table_prefix (or database, if set up that way) depending on the domain being called.

    It wouldn't be similar to MU in any other way that it allowing a single set of files to serve up multiple domains.

    For example, users are separated, and "bob" on domian1 might not be "bob" on domain4 for example.

  6. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 16 years ago #

    "then what are the advantages to mu?"

    Depends omn what you're using it for. As intended, there's quite a bit of advantage. When you start getting into multiple domains and needing to edit templates and user certain plugins that is when the disadvantages start to outweigh things.

    MU is built to host subdomain or subdirectory "lite" blogs. It does that job pretty darn well.

    "everyone seems to suggest it is a bear to get running correctly..."

    And following instructions seem to be a common issue too. :) It's more difficult to use and understand than basic WP. If you have that understanding, it's only a bit more involved.

  7. expaand
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    I have used mu for about month now. We have hosted about 175 blogs for our clients. They are each on a subdomain off of a common master domain. Here is
    a summary of my experience so far:

    1. Installation was simple! this was the easiest part.

    2. Things worked pretty much like you would expect - no real problems.

    3. I have a few questions about "primary" and "secondary" blogs, but other than that, everything seems straightforward.

    4. I added some functions to the xmlrpc module so we could do alot of configuring remotely, via a batch process. This has worked like a champ.

    So here is what I would say, when comparing mu to lunabyte's famous hack:

    1. There is a nice interface for handling the multiple blogs. There is a concept of an admin "superuser" who can go in and modify any of the blogs, without having to be a user of a paricular blog. This, IMHO, is the nicest feature of mu.

    2. The concept of "user" is not tied to a particular blog - if this is important to you, it is nice (for us, it is of no consequence, as each blog is a world onto itself, and users wouldn't really be in common).

    3. If you so desire, there exists the facility for allowing anyone to sign up and create a blog, and also to delete their blog. Again, for us, we do not want this feature - folks pay for their blogs from us, and we set them all up with a specific configuration.

    So, the real issue which we haven't addressed yet, is that of allowing each blog in an mu farm to be assigned an (additional and optional) arbitrary domain, and to allow arbitrary deep-linking from that domain. That is, if in
    the mu farm, a blog is:

    blog1.farm.net

    but we want to use a domain like "mydomain1.com",
    we would be able to do allow linking from outside pages like:

    http://mydomain1.com/2008/01/01/my-article

    (in addition to http://blog1.farm.net/2008/01/01/my-article, which works already).

    It seems like it is easy to access a mu blog via an external domain using a standard "forward". For example, in godaddy, you can forward the domain "mydomain1.com" to "blog1.farm.net". If someone types "mydomain1.com" in a browser, they will get to your blog. Deeplinking even seems to work. However, at the top of the browser it will not say "mydomain1.com", but rather blog1.farm.net". That is, once you get to the blog, all addressing is "native" (not rewritten). If that's not a problem, without further hacks or work, mu does the trick.

    (BTW, I am working on a plugin for mu to allow each user to efficiently access their site stats from awstats through the admin interface. If anyone is interested in this, please let me know)

  8. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Search for domain mapping here in the forums and also look at this plugin:
    http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/Multi-Site-Manager

    And I'd *love* to know how you're getting subdomain stats from awstats. :D

  9. expaand
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

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