WordPress MU

Hi,

I'm new to wordpress MU however I have used wordpress for many years.

I'm wanting to create a wordpress mu site at the college I work at for students to use. This will save money on internet fees as instead of using a external site such as wikispaces. For what the students are using it for, Wordpress will do fine.

One problem i am having is getting sites to work when just typing in the address of the server. I haven't set it up proper yet, but i need it know if its able to be done.

IE: if i type in "http://mcc-wp1/test/" will i be able to access the site that is setup there. Not only that, but there will be a external address for parents and students to access their sites from home eg: blogs.school.vic.edu.au.

I tried with uniform server on my local box however, just got page dose not exist errors. I'm taking at to do the /test/ thingy i uses .htaccess or something like that.

My last question is, is it worth setting up on a linux box or on a windows box? Will this help me in the long run?

The college is made up of MACs and PC with a Windows Backend (mixture of 2003 and 2008 severs) and CISCO switching and wireless networking.

If i dont make sense, tell me and i will try to be clear.

Thanks guys

-Pete

If you set it up on a Linux box, yes it will make your life easier.

Also, it needs a hostname like something.something. Usign http://mcc-wp1 will likely give strange issues.

The URL to the subfodler blogs, and the permalinks use mod_rewrite. That has to be enabled for them to work.

Can I be a little cynical here and suggest that you'll save yourself all of a handful of $s a month (if that).

Now... how much do you value your time? How much will it cost to power the server locally? etc.

Not that I don't think it's a fun service... but unless you are looking at a cohort of tens of thousands - in active use - (in which case your server is going to doe anyway) then I think it;s a false economy.

Well, we would like full control over our students and also, via using ISA we can protect our students from the outside world and only allow people who the student want their website to bee seen by see it along with the rest of the college.

And, how do I value my own time. Well, I'm the lowest systems administrator in our deptment. My main job is system rollouts and once that is over (which will be a cupple of weeks) we will move onto another project for me.

1. Host it on Linux. Yes some people have done it on Windows, but honestly it's not worth it.

2. For the URL I recommend using a fully qualified domain name and not a windows machine name address.

3. From your post it looks like you want to have an internal URL where the blogs are in a subdirectory and a public URL where it's a subdomain. Unless you're very clever with a proxy server (ISA), I doubt you'll be able to do this.

Generally speaking the following is true:

Won't work: internal.domain.edu/blogname --mapped to--> blogname.domain.com

Will work: blogname.internal.domain.edu --mapped to--> blogname.external.domain.edu

To do the latter, use Donncha's domain mapping plugin to do the domain change and then just use ISA to prevent people browsing the internal domain addresses.