I just finished setting up WPMU for my personal blogs. I just want to share my experience with you. What follows is what I just posted in one of my blogs at
http://rnajera.com/tech/2007/12/17/wpmu-installation-report/
I hope this is the right place to post this in the forums.
Best,
Rafael.
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In one of those work marathons that I can only do when I should be working in something else I managed to install and configure Wordpress μ (WPMU), and to move all of my blogs to the new platform. If you go to rnajera.com you will get now, besides welcome messages in English and Spanish, a summary of what’s new in all my websites.
According to the creators of WPMU, this software is designed with huge blog farms in mind, people like Wordpress.com for instance. I only have 4 blogs at the moment but only the promise of not having to upgrade each one of them individually every time there’s a new Wordpress version out convinced me to give it a try.
It works really well in spite of the snags one hits when just getting into it. Some of the plugins don’t work anymore, there’s even less documentation available than for the standalone version of Wordpress and there’s still some minor quirks regarding global options and languages. All in all, however, it’s a good thing and I will keep it.
I’m running it in my main domain with blogs in subdirectories. The installer writes a new version of .htaccess that makes it so that you will have access to any subdirectories you have in your installation folder. In my case, my blogs were already in $HOME/blog1, $HOME/blog2, etc, so I didn’t lose access to them while installing and configuring WP μ.
Before going live I created blogs in WPMU with different names and transferred all my data from the older blogs. When I deemed a new WPMU version of a blog ready for primetime, I just renamed it in WPMU (which can be done in the site admin interface with the Edit option in the Blogs tab; you have to change the url in several places for it to work). Then I renamed the old blog’s directory in my webserver and voilà.
Here are some tips that might be useful:
Backup the .htacess file in your installation directory if you have one. As far I know, the installer overwrites the file. In my case my main domain is controlled by CPanel, which writes redirects to .htaccess in the main directory. After installing WPMU I had to copy the contents of the old .htaccess file to the newly generated one in order to get back all my settings. Backup also favicon.ico, that also gets overwritten.
The recommendation is to backup everything, which I did, but I ended up only having to copy .htaccess and favicon.ico back. Of course it depends on your particular circumstances.
Moving Wordpress blogs from the standalone version to μ can be a pain because the import/export mechanism does not copy everything. For starters, you lose all of your excerpts in the process. In my case I didn’t rely too much on them in any of my blogs, so it wasn’t a big deal.
In order to move your blogroll and links, export them by accessing the following script in your old blog:
http://yourblogurl/wp-links-opml.php
Now, that script really came out of nowhere to me. I don’t think it’s accessible from the admin interface and I had never heard about it before.
Anyway, some people recommend to edit the text file and fix whatever strange characters maybe in the file. I didn’t have problems with that. In any case, just save the resulting file in text format and then use to import your links into your new installation. You will lose all of you categories, which can be a real pain in some cases.
I had problems importing posts with images with alt tags containing accented vowels (á, é, …), so you may want to check that. I suppose the post content sanitizer didn’t like accented vowels but instead of going around them it simply cut to the next paragraph without even closing the img tag. No problem with the letter ñ though but I have to look further into this.
Put all the plugins you want to be accessible to your blogs in wp-content/plugins, not in wp-content/mu-plugins. The plugins in mu-plugins are meant to be activated by default and you won’t see them in the plugins tab in the admin interface for the blogs. In fact, they’re not even accessible to the site administrator.
Moreover, some plugins won’t work there, specially if they need per user options. This is the case of Akismet, which is probably why it’s not included in the standard distribution of WP μ. In the case of Akismet you can make it work in mu-plugins, but if you will end up with a lot of blogs sharing the same key and that might get into (legal) trouble. At least that’s I’ve read in the forums.
If you want to set your default options for new blogs to something different than what WP μ gives you apparently you have to mess up with the code. I didn’t do it. There might be a plugin for it, but I haven’t really searched.
If you want to have a list of the latest posts sitewide (like the one I have at rnajera.com, you’re going to have to do some coding. I couldn’t find a ready-made plugin or code to do it, so I made one based on a script at WPMU Dev.
This script does not work for me for two reasons. First, it does not really give you a sitewide list of posts ordered by post date but rather a list of posts published not so far back in the past, or something like that. Second, it relies on the ‘guid’ field in the posts table. As far as I know that field, which is supposed to have the post’s url, does not get updated when you change things such as the blog main url or the permalink structure.
Next time I’ll post my solution to the problem. My solution as it is does not scale at all, but it does give me an ordered list with the correct links as you can see in my main page.
That’s all for now.
