WordPress MU

Im considering this configuration and wondering if others think its possible or whether I am crazy for trying to do it

I will be installing wpmu/buddypress on a main domain using subdomain structure - nothing fancy there.

Most of the subdomain blogs will be typically simple user blogs and act as normal - still good.

Now, here comes the challenge. I have an existing site hosted on a different domain running normal wp that I want to bring in and move to be a subdomain of the new wpmu/buddypress site. This site is very large database - we are using wp as a CMS and have 60k posts and lots of data in the postmeta, plus I am running some pretty advanced plugins that I have found to cause problems when implemented in wpmu. So, I don't think I can (or want) to convert this blog to be an instance of wpmu - I want to keep it as a single wp install,but I still want to have the user layer come from the wpmu site.

This is how I'm thinking of merging the two:
* Create a clone blog entry in wpmu that will act as the place holder for my single wp subdomain (I can use htacess or special theme here to redirect anyone who finds the clone subdomain to my real subdomain) - This is to generate a blog_id to be used in the single wp database prefix.
* Create a server-side subdomain in order for my single wp install to resolve correctly and install it in that subdomain folder.
* In my single wp install - Set CUSTOMER_USER_TABLE and CUSTOMER_USERMETA_TABLE to point to the wpmu usertables - so now all the users will be in the same table and login/logout will go through the wpmu process
* My single wp install will include the clone blog_id in its prefix in order to have all the capabilities working correctly in the usermeta table

I **think** this scenario should work. What do you think?

The other question is regarding cookies and how the single install wp could read the wpmu cookies to check to see if logged in - if I just set the single wp info to use the same salt/auth keys as wpmu, and since they are both using same user/usermeta tables, it should work, right?

Any guidance on this is greatly appreciated before I go down the path of learning out the hard way this won't work :)

I would skip step one.

Set up your VirtualHost for the standalone installation of Wordpress with precedence over VirtualHost directive of the WPMU install. This way your server will serve up the standalone WP before attempting to locate a subdomain of the WPMU install.

Set up your standalone version to use a different table prefix, such as wps_ or whatever you would like to use. Then set your CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USERMETA_TABLE as you mentioned. Then set all your SALTS, KEYS and the NONCE to match. You shouldn't have to set up any dummy information under WPMU at all for this project. :)

Thanks delayedinsanity. Thats helpful to know it should work.

One part I failed to mention on this forum (and probably why I wanted to create the dummy wpmu blog to act as a proxy) is that I will also be running buddypress on the wpmu site.

So, I want to have the ability to create all the groups and allow people to associate with this particular blog as if it were part of the wpmu world.

I even want to have the buddybar show up on top of this blog like it would any other - Im still trying to figure that part out. I think I can create a single page template on the dummy blog that justs generates the buddybar html, then I can incorporate that into my single wp theme either via php include or as an iframe to make it look seamless.

Do you think that is possible? (I've also asked this on buddypress forum - waiting to hear back).

Honestly can't help on that one. I've yet to find the time (or desire I suppose) to play with buddypress.

It might be worth the effort to set up a sandbox and try integrating the existing standalone installation into µ - while it's probably not going to be next week, and it may not even be this year, but when the marge happens you'll just be running two seperate installs of the same application anyways. If there's planned longevity for this site, integration at the early stages may be slightly more involving but beneficial nonetheless.

Most issues with plugins that don't function properly on µ, at least in so far as I've discovered to date (fair warning, I'm hardly a Wordpress guru), is with incorrect path settings more than anything else. Plugins tend to look blindly for wp-content/uploads, without factoring in the possibility of looking for wp-content/blogs.dir, for example. Those incompatibilities are generally easy to fix, so long as you track them all down (grep is your friend, or on Windows, any IDE that has multiple file search).