WordPress MU

Hello,

We are going to set up about 10-20 blogs in the future for different departments of our company. However most of the "soon-to-be-editors" need time to test and get used to the new blog-environment. At the same time, we need to have a couple of blogs already online.

We would like to stick with just one wpmu-install and don't really want to set up a separate test-installation.

Is it possible to restrict access to a single blog within a wpmu-environment (for example with .htaccess)? Simultaneous all wp-functions should already be available to the editors (so i can't just deactivate a specific blog).

I'll appreciate any input.
Greetz
Nils (hr-onlinede)

I'm not sure what you mean by "restrict access to a single blog". But, yes, you can create individual blogs for the departments and the only people who will be able to log into them are the people who have the username and password for the individual blogs.

For what it's worth, if you are only going to have 20 or so blogs, I would seriously consider using individual WP installs instead of mu.

ekusteve, IMHO, I think even if you have 5 or less blogs, WPMU would still be a great choice because you never know what the future holds. Having 20 individual WP blogs and later if they decided to scale, those 20 will be a super pain to integrate. I know you can do export/import, but that's not 100% seamless and you do lose some information.

In my office here, I've set MU on an intranet to replace an aging website and we have like 6 individual units. WPMU works perfectly and I've created a sandbox blog to do most of the testing. That way if we want to take a post or page live to production blog, I can login to the database dupe the page or post to the production blog. As far as restriction, you could install subscriber plugin...

Yes, I think it all depends on individual circumstances and needs.

Steve

I guess you could always add them as user accounts, and then make a test/practice blog where they can play around.

That would seem the "easiest" method to me.

Thx for all your input. I'm gonna stick with wpmu, cause my company ain't quite sure how many blogs they'll finally realize ;)

What I'm still don't understand: How can i config a blog (within wpmu-environment), so that it can't be read by non-registered users?

I found a plugin (http://mu.bloggles.info/2006/09/16/private-blog-2/) which seems to fit my requirements, but can't I do it with the basic wmpu-config?

Greetz
Nils (hr-onlinede)

Hey guys,

I still can't figure it out. Is there a way to make a wpmu-blog readable only to registered users (kind of a private blog)?

best regards
Nils

There is a plugin somewhere you'll find it if you google. I can't really remember what it is called but I played around with it and it works. I'm pretty sure it has been discussed here as well.

Richard