WordPress MU

Hi everyone,

I would like to discuss Wordpress MU Structure and Capabilities. Particulary, Suppose I've created a full social networking website. Composed of just Wordpress MU, will all my members recieve all the Structure and Capabilities similar to that of a normal wordpress installations, i.e install their own prefered plugins, themes etc.

I've never used Wordpress MU before, so I'm not completely familiar with it. I would like to offer as much control and freedom to all my users as I can possible offer. Therefore for each instance created I would it to be a normal full wordpress installation.

Is Wordpress MU and it's plugins the right solution here. Or will I have to create an instance of wordpress for each new user manually on the server.

And how would anyone approach this?

I'll be very glad for all your responses.

When you install WPMU, the plugins and themes you install are shared between ALL users. By default, users cannot install plugins & themes because of this.

The do have individual control of what they can enable though.

While what you want can be done (via other plugins) I woudl not recommend it in a free public signup situation.

Thanks for the response Andrea.

Why not?

And how would you approach such a situation.

Why not?

User gets access to upload a theme using existing plugins to do so from the backend (let's just say).

User gets a theme from one of those free theme places with encrypted code or worse in the footer.

User enables the theme.

The possibility exists here for code in the theme's functions file to do thing like DROP TABLE wp_blogs.

Bye bye site.

You can allow each blog to have its own special plugins & themes folder. But again, this gets a pain in the rear if you get a large site with a free-for-all public signup situation.

If I were charging people to have a blog, say for businesses, then I might do something like this.

"I've never used Wordpress MU before, so I'm not completely familiar with it."

Your best bet is to go over to wordpress.com, sign up and poke around. That will be very similar to your proposed user's experience.

On one of the sites I run, I add new plugins and themes on a semi-regular basis. For my preferred members, I may add plugins & themes they request, after I give them a quick test. That site is locked down and has been for a bit, and I am pretty familiar with the userbase.

Yes, this would be a free to public system.

Suppose I was to make an insatnce of the normal wordpress installation for each new member I recieve and allocate a new database for that installation. Would that be a good idea and would it work.

Yes it would work, but it wouldn't be WPMU.

That approach is basically web hosting with a control panel like cpanel that can auto-deploy instances of wordpress in each customer's space.

Could you give me a quick walk through of the all proccess.

Thank you.