WordPress MU

Hello all,

Just wanted to make our presence known in the community :-D

CNET's Online Courses have been running on WPMU for about two years now. I just finished upgrading to WPMU 1.2.3 from a highly customized pre RC version. (And lived to tell the tale :-)

Each course listed is its own WPMU blog (although it's worth noting that the directory page itself that is linked to is actually running in a separate WP install, long story ;-)

Some of the ways in which we are utilizing WPMU are probably somewhat unconventional compared to how a lot of other folks probably use it. Essentially, we are using it as a CMS, only our editorial staff can technically create new blogs ("Courses" ). The original idea was going to be to allow everyone to create their own blogs, but for reasons of scalability, manageability, and other considerations, we have held off on that, for now at least.

But this is hopefully at least an interesting example of how WPMU can be used as a CMS for a fairly large commercial site.

In a nutshell, each course has 6 Lesson "Pages", and each of those pages has a corresponding Assignment "Posts". Each Assignment has several questions related to the topic, and class participants simply leave comments in response to the Assignment Post.

Initially installed & set up by Matt Mullenweg & Jeff Minard in the summer of '05, I pretty much inherited sole ownership of this beast when they moved on in the fall of '05. Since then, I have developed a myriad of customizations/plugins/hacks/tweaks to suit our business needs. These include coordination with ad servers, mass e-mail operations, integration with user registration systems via remote auth, and all sorts of other fun *challenges* :-D

It's a work in progress, to be sure, and there are some existing WPMU features that we aren't really using just yet, but that we likely will. We'll be adding quite a few bells & whistles over the next few months.

For all the hours of pulling out your own hair that go along with developing & customizing this great software, I will say that in the end it is fun & rewarding, and I think WPMU has a lot of potential.

Kudos to everyone who contributes to the forums, docs etc!

I welcome any questions or feedback & I look forward to participating in the WPMU community!

Cheers!

Hi, nice use of WPMU.
What amount of traffic do the courses receive ?
What kind of clustering is in place ?

also, what's your approach regarding source code ? Do you have a lot of hacks or mostly plugins ? Are you using WP-Cache, object cache ?

Hi Quenting,

The traffic varies greatly from class to class, depending on which are being promoted across other channels and what not. (actually I'm not sure if I'm allowed to disclose the actual numbers, I might have to be careful about that :-D

but I think it's safe to say that we get on average anywhere from 1000-4000 total unique users per day, and 30,000-50,000 "page views" (according to some of the wacky metrics I'm glancing at ). That's cumulative for all of the classes.

At the moment we are only running on one dedicated machine, but I'm actually looking into other hosting options as we speak.

As for source code, these days it's pretty much all about plugins & custom themes/template files, with the exception of typical configuration settings (wp-config, for instance)

Prior to upgrading to 1.2.3, I was a little guilty of scattering custom functions & hacks throughout some of the core files. But while going through the upgrade process, I centralized almost all of our customizations into plugins or template files, with the exception of a few custom scripts that need to live at the top level. I learned quickly that it was necessary in order to make future upgrades far less painful :-)

For example, I have a "custom-functions.php", rather than adding to the core functions files.

Just started using object cache this week, have not experimented yet with wp-cache, but have been reading up on it.

Thanks for your questions/feedback!

I saw your site a while back - impressive. Don't you love bending the program to your will? :D I really like how you've set up the courses within the blog sturcture - once i got my head wrapped around it. brilliant.

Hmm, customs-fuctions.php. I am simultaniously going "oooo!" and "doh!" at the same time.

That absolutely rocks! Great stuff, am not just impressed but also thinking, a lot, about how this could work with Edublogs!

Thanks for sharing :)

Thanks for your flattering comments :-D Indeed it is fun , WPMU can be putty in your hands once you get through the initial stages of head scratching & cursing

Farms - thanks & it's funny you say that, as I was peeking at your site for ideas as well. If you have any questions by all means fire away! That's the spirit of this sort of thing at its best

Thanks again!