WordPress MU

I just realized that since I'll be having hundreds of users each with their own blogs, and each game we host will need it's own blog, that a regular wordpress installation isn't going to work for me. I started to google for some plugins or anything that I could use to still be able to use WP and the first result that came back was WPMU. So, I have it downloaded, but I need to know if I can upgrade from regular WP to WPMU before I do anything. My default WP theme is somewhat modified, but most of my modifications are simplified down in to a few functions in functions.php. The files won't be much of a problem. But the database will be a problem, I have a lot of pages set up already that I don't want to lose. What are my options?

I already looked in the FAQ, by the way.

Export form the WP blog, Import into whatever blog on the MU system.

Copy your theme over, and for plugins test them *one at a time*.

Andrea,

Thanks for the quick reply! I don't have any plugins at the moment, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if Wordpress is the best tool for me to use. I'm the administrator for Ace Gaming Syndicate and we host multiple games and have multiple teams for each game.

What I need to set up is a site where users have a single login for the whole site, and each user gets their own blog at <username>.acegamingsyndicate.com. Only one login for the whole site is what I'm starting to question, because if I set up a blog for each game and each team, wouldn't those require seperate logins? Or could I just assign Suzy as an administrator for lets say the Team Ace blog, so Suzy could write her own content for that game's blog while at the same time still be able to use her own blog?

I also need compatible forums that can use the same cookies and logins as WP, so I settled on bbPress. I'm assuming that bbPress works with WPMU but I don't know until I've tested it, would you happen to know if it's compatible with WPMU?

Last question I think. Would I be able to set it so that when a new user registers, his blog is automatically created?

Yep, yep and yep. :)

You may also want to click on my name. :D

Users logged in to the system will be logged in across *all* blogs. To do anything on each blog, they still might have to be added to it, depending on what user role you want them to have. (say, anything other that leaving a comment)

Users can have multiple blogs of their own, or be added to multiple blogs. You can control signups, offering just a username or just a blog for logged in users, or both, or for anyone. :)

bbpress of course works well for WPMU, since it's by the same people.

Andrea,

Awesome, thanks. I ran in to a problem with installing it, apparently it doesn't like me using localhost. Once my dedicated server gets set up and I get all my domains and files transferred over, I'll resume work on it at a test domain.

Nope, it doesn't like localhost. you can configure your localhost to respond to something like localhost.localdomain, or even yourdomainname.local.

I really think setting it up on a test domain and giving it a whirl will both answer a lot of questions AND get you excited.

You need to read this post.

Andrea,

I've been enjoying it quite a bit so far, though there are some things I would prefer to change on it. For example, there are some plugins from regular WP that I have installed but I want them to automatically be active on each new blog created. In another topic, I think you posted on it, thanks to some help I figured out how to make it ignore certain subdomains which is a giant help.

Lunabyte,

I will definitely be needing to use MU for this setup. I have a dedicated server already being set up for it, ordered it last week when I figured the site was close enough to being finished to put it up and have people test it(mainly the forums, styling forums I've never worked with before will take some time to work out all the CSS I may have missed). On average, I've spent about 10 hours a day the past month working on this site. The group it's for, Ace Gaming Syndicate, is intended to be similar to what you see at sk-gaming.com where there are thousands of users.

Granted, I may not be the most experienced webmaster/developer, but I'll work my way through it and figure it out. WPMU is in fact the perfect solution for me.

Thank you both for your replies, I'm glad I found out about WPMU and this community.