WordPress MU

Not sure if anyone has visited tutorials20.com, I'm 99.9% sure that its using Wordpress MU, the only reason I'm not 100% sure is because it wasn't in the Strut your Stuff section, and I figured a site of this caliber using MU would have already made it into that forum, but then again the webmaster prolly doesn't like to strut his stuff :P.

Anyways lets break this down:

1.) Firstly how do you achieve a simple sign-up used on this site? Its like a WP-Login asking for Username and E-mail and no fuss about privacy setting and all that hoopla, and I believe it automatically sets you up as author.

2.) The top 10 tutorials section which I'm sure is pretty easy to achieve, but if you look closely it has thumbnails of the finished outcome of the tutorial, but if you click on the link there isn't any image within the post that it could possibly pull that image from, because the tutorials is actually one giant jpeg.

3.) The admin area has the header with the navigation integrated, I'm assuming I just have to fiddle with a php file, but I hope someone can elaborate on this.

4.) How do you clean up the admin area so Wordpress updates aren't pegged all over in the dashboard section, if possible can dashboard be removed :P.

As great as the site is and the potential of MU, there are some things that I find a bit clumsy with MU, which I thought I throw out there hoping that we could find a fix if possible. The problem I see is within the admin section where comments waiting for moderation are being shown although it isn't authorized for your approval, as well as the managed section where it shows all posts from all members which I think is rather dumb because finding your own post to edit seems like a tedious task to sift through, although functional it is a bit bulky.

Thats all I can think of for now, but I'm hoping people sign-up and explore the site a bit and maybe we can all work together to break this site down and help others trying to achieve something similar? Sorry for the long post, but I feel this has been the best example of MU's potential and I feel we could all benefit using this site as a standard. Thanks in advance.

It's a regular WordPress site. Or a Mu site that doesn't hand out blogs anyway. The sign up is to register as an author on that blog - you don't get your own blog.

As for the rest:

1. You can rewrite the signup script to do whatever you want. I have the privacy setting as a hidden value so users can't change it, for example. You could put all info on one page, or automatically use the username as the subdomain. And of course you can make it all look however you want to make it look. Just takes a little work.

2. I don't know. Maybe the tutorial author submits the image.

3. Start with /wp-admin/index.php and go from there.

4. Search /wp-admin/index.php for devnews and planetnews.

Your next paragraph has nothing to do with Mu. What you describe is a function of being just another user in a regular WordPress blog, which is what that site is. In a Mu install you don't see other people's posts in your admin section, and you can do whatever you want with comments.

I did sign up and poke around, and yeah, it's just WordPress. They did some nice theme work, but there isn't any stand out neat-o added functionality that I can see.

So nice site, sure, but totally irrelevant to what we're doing here.

Thanks for clarifying that, but you say:

"In a Mu install you don't see other people's posts in your admin section, and you can do whatever you want with comments."

I'm running MU on XAMPP and when I created a new user and within the Admin panel I still see comments which are meant to be authorized by the admin and posts written by the admin within the manage section and comments section respectively. Not sure if I'm getting the grasp on this, I guess this is what threw me off with tutorials20.com because the admin part was pretty much the same and I couldn't decipher the difference.

If you create a new user and assign him to the admin blog (or whatever other existing blog), then sure, he can see whatever is on that blog.

But in Mu when you sign up as a brand new user and register a brand new blog, you can only see information for that blog in the admin section. Try it.