WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials

Super Cache and extra goodies

andrea — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:36:13 +0000

Donncha has updated WP Super Cache again and has quite a long post about it. One thing that stood out for me is that if you are using it in multisite you can disable specific blogs from being cached.

Whoa. Nice one!

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

How to make a theme demo site

andrea — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:20:33 +0000

One thing I get asked occasionally, which is really easy to do, is how do you make a theme demo site? Maybe you’re getting into the premium theme business (jump in, just do something different ), maybe you have a bunch of pro / developer packages and just want a white label site for your clients to choose themes from.

How do you set this up?

Easy-peasy – just install multisite.

Sure, there’s a few little extras, but that’s the bulk of the work. You can choose to change your main site into a network, or you can install multisite off in a subfolder or subdomain so it’s separate from your main site, and pick the subfolder install for ease of use and so it looks like just pages off the main install. Your visitors will not really notice a difference, especially if the main site in the network has a theme that matches your original single site. With it separate, you can also let some clients in the whole install without letting them in to your main (separated) site. Access to sub sites can be controlled on a per user basis (this is built in to multisite remember).

So now you have multisite set up – let’s say on a subdomain. Just install all the themes you want to demo. I usually do it in bulk using FTP, then I go network enable all the themes.

Now, create your sub sites. I give each site the name of the theme – that makes it easy to remember and almost painfully obvious. WordPress.com even does the same thing for its theme demos. (click the “See it in action” button on any theme there.)

Visit the admin area of each site, activate the required theme, import the demo content, drag some widgets around, do some menus – whatever you like. The good part is here you can have generic text for all or use special demo text on each site, listing the theme’s features.

For navigating between the sub sites, you can use Diamond multisite widgets and use the blog listing widget on every site to go back and forth between them. Or use custom links on your custom menu and type in each blog link.

But hey – that also sounds like work. You could set up one demo site and assuming you want to use most of the same content, use a plugin like the Replicator to make a copy of that template site every time you create a new site. Our Network Home pages ebook also has a section on how to include a site listing that updates itself.

Another use-case for this same setup is if you are developing several themes at once. Why use separate installs? Slap up multisite somewhere, close off registration – even lock it down via privacy plugins and work away in happiness. The admin bar makes it super easy to switch between sub sites.

So – who is going to try this first?

© andrea for WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: client, customers, demo, paid, premium, shop, Themes, white label

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Updates for WordPress 3.3

Ron — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:59:29 +0000

I’ve updated the development version of both Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags.

The update to domain mapping has a few warnings fixed & addresses the issue of saving the settings in WP 3.3.

The update to Sitewide tags has a few fixes. If you were having an issue with SWT adding duplicate categories, can you give this a test and let me know if it fixes the issue? I’ve not been able to reproduce the issue with the latest development version.

© Ron for WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: domain mapping, plugin update, sitewide, tags, WordPress 3.3

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Multisite upload limit bug in 3.3

andrea — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:39:18 +0000

Turns out there’s a wee bug in multisite in 3.3 with the upload limits. If you;re limiting upload space on user’s sites, it gets stuck at 50mb.

Patch is here in the meantime.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Multisite in the wild

andrea — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:06:51 +0000

How many multisite installs are out there, anyway? In a recent forum post unrelated to multisite but using those numbers for comparison, Jane gave some numbers:

We can’t really get very accurate stats, because we only know about *installs* that phone home, not number of users on each one who might need the multisite menus. We know of about 60,000+ multisite installations, half of which have more than two sites. The average is 58.7 sites per multisite install (that gets us into the 3.5 million sites mark, times however many users per site). Then, 31 installs have more than 10k sites. Edublogs, for example, has over a million sites. Universities like CUNY have thousands/tens of thousands of users per install.

And a bit later:

Better stat courtesy of @nacin:

“Chop off the 31 sites > 10,000 sites, chop off the 30,000 sites <= 2 sites.

96.3979 average for the remaining 30,000 networks."

I actually talked to Nacin about these numbers back in July at WordCamp Montreal, so these stats are not surprising to me. Seems a little low though – what do you think?

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Where do people sign up in multisite?

andrea — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:36:57 +0000

I’ve been asked this a few times, as it is not obvious from the admin area where users are supposed to go to sign up – either for a user or a new site in multisite.

You can change the registration settings under Network Admin -> Settings. For members of the public, direct to them to yourdomain.com/wp-signup.php.

Yes, this gives you a signup page almost exactly like the one at WordPress.com. Any attempts to visit the single WP registration link will be redirected to this signup link on the main site.

© andrea for WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: registration, signup

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Proposed change for ms-files.php & image handling

andrea — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:32:09 +0000

This trac ticket has been tagged for 3.4 which is quite a while away from happening. Basically, the current way multisite handles images on the sub sites, is by running every request through a file called ms-files.php. This can actually be overridden via the sunrise.php file.

The proposed change would involve moving new sub site images into wp-content/uploads/sites/ where it makes much more sense. I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the blogs.dir folder and image rewrite rules.

This would also be handled in such a way that your current image uploads would not suddenly break. That would be a nightmare.

If you have worked extensively in this are of multisite, please chime in on the trac ticket.

© andrea for WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: images, improvement, multisite, porposed, trac

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

VaultPress now for multisite

andrea — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:28:54 +0000

Over the weekend I noticed a page go up on the Vaultpress site for multisite instructions. Today, the official announcement came out for Vaultpress multisite support.

Interestingly enough is the pricing model: each sub site needs its own license. On a network with a huge number of sites this could be quite financially limiting. But you could use Vaultpress on the main site only, in conjunction with regular backups of your own. After all, the biggest benefit of VaultPress that I can see is the file scanning, and there’s only one copy of core files in a network.

What do you think?

© andrea for WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: multisite, vaultpress, wpmu

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

What we did at camp

andrea — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:59:22 +0000

Last weekend, Ron and I did a joint session and workshop at WordCamp Toronto. Our first session was a soft intro to multisite highlighting how we got into it, how ti developed, and what we use it for. Then we highlighted how other people use it. You can see the slides below.

WordPress and Multisite

View more presentations from Andrea Rennick

On Day Two we did a 3 hour session on setting up multisite. We also walked through the network admin area and squeezed in at the end some of the more common plugins in use for common tasks they might want to accomplish.

The workshop was *awesome* and we very much would like to do that again. Ron & I got some great feedback, and I know I learned a few things about how I might want to do these in the future, as well as pacing, material to cover – etc. Ron and I took turns speaking and helping attendees with specific issues.

I wanted to post here to let the multisite-interested people find more good information and see how people *are* talking about it at WordCamps everywhere. Apparently at WordCamp Philly there was a session on multisite as well, on the same day.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Maintenance mode pluin for multisite

andrea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:14:32 +0000

Joshua Parker, a long time user of multisite and its previous incarnation, WPMU, has released a plugin called WPMS Site Maintenance Mode

This plugin allows a user admin on the network to put the entire install under maintenance mode or just selected sites.

Haven’t given it a whirl yet, but it looks pretty useful.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh