Tag Archive for 'WordpressMU'

So you want more than one blog? Part II

Published
by
Smitty
on March 17, 2008
in Getting Started and Templates, Themes, and Design
. 0 Comments

One of the things you will want to do once you get your WordPress Mu installed is to offer up your users a variety of templates to choose from.

WordPress Mu boasts as being able to support all themes that work on a normal install of WordPress. That works in theory, but doesn’t work in real life.

Tip: Use one of the more popular themes, it is more likely to work with WordPress Mu.

There are several big names using various versions of WordPress Mu. I try to use themes that they use, I figure that they have invested sometime to determine which themes work well and don’t work well. Below is a list of themes that I’ve compiled that I would consider using in my WordPress Mu installs.

Themes

  • 72 Class
  • Almost Spring
  • Ambiru
  • anarchy
  • Andreas04
  • Andreas09
  • Anubis
  • Banana Smoothie
  • Batavia 1.5
  • Benevolence
  • Black-LetterHead
  • Blix
  • Bluebird
  • Blue Green
  • Blue Moon
  • Blue Zinfandel Enhanced
  • Borderline Chaos
  • ChaosTheory
  • ChaoticSoul
  • Citris IslandWP
  • CleanTidy
  • CommentPress
  • Connections
  • Contempt
  • Copyblogger
  • Cordobo Green Park
  • Crop Circles
  • Cutline
  • Daisy Rae Gemini
  • DayDream
  • Deep Blue
  • Deichnetz
  • Digg 3 Column
  • Dignity
  • Dixie Belle
  • Dusk
  • Emire
  • Fadtastic
  • Falling Dreams
  • Fauna
  • Fjords04
  • Fleur De Lys
  • Flex
  • Flower Power
  • Framefake Theme
  • Fresh Bananas
  • Freshy
  • Garland
  • GenkiTheme
  • Gentle Calm
  • Girl in Green
  • GloriousDay
  • GlossyBlue
  • Greenday
  • Greenery
  • Green Marinee
  • Gridlock
  • Hemingway
  • Iceburgg
  • Jakarta
  • Jentri
  • K2
  • K2-lite
  • Kubrick
  • LetoPrime
  • LetterHead
  • Light
  • Mandigo
  • man~ja
  • MistyLook
  • Neat!
  • Neo-Sapien
  • Newsportal
  • Nikynik BlueMU
  • Northern-Web-Coders
  • Ocadia
  • Ocean Mist
  • OceanWide
  • Pinky-Kupy
  • Primitivo
  • Pool
  • PressRow
  • Quadruple Blue
  • Quentin
  • RadMod
  • Reaching Darkness
  • Redoable
  • Redoable Lite
  • Regulus
  • Rounded
  • RoundedFlow
  • Rubric
  • Sandbox
  • Sandbox-10
  • Sapphire
  • SeaShore
  • Shocking Blue Green
  • Silver is the New Black
  • Simpla
  • Simplr
  • Solipus
  • Sunburn
  • Supposedly Clean
  • Suhsweet
  • sumenep
  • Stean
  • StrippedPlus
  • Sweet Blossoms
  • Tarski
  • TerraFirma
  • Trevilian Way
  • The Journalist
  • Thirteen
  • Thoughts
  • Toni
  • Treba
  • Twenty-eight Thirteen
  • Twilight
  • Unsleepable
  • Vermilion Christmas
  • veryplaintext
  • Vertigo
  • Vistered Little
  • WaterWilly
  • White as Milk
  • WordPress Classic
  • WordPress II Silver

There are many places to download themes on the internet, usually each theme can be found in a couple of places. I would suggest Googling the theme name plus “WordPress”. You could also use one of the many theme viewers and cross reference your findings with this list to see if it is one of the themes known to work with the Mu version. Lastly, I would suggest downloading the lastest release directly from the developers website. This might take a little extra work, but you would be guaranteed to find the most up to date version.

So you want more than one blog? Part I

Published
by
Smitty
on February 25, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Blogging Platforms
. 3 Comments

I happen to work for a school district, where we get frequent request for blog installs. With a normal Wordpress installation, only one blog can be hosted per install. This is great if you only want one blog, or possibly two. But if you need to maintain 10, 100 or even a 1000 blogs, it is time to start looking at different solution. You will find it very time consuming to keep Wordpress, plugins, and themes all up to date across multiple installs.

I use a modified version of Wordpress called WordpressMU, which allows you to have one install of Wordpres and about as many blogs as you want (space permitting). Some big names use it like Wordpress.com, EduBlogs, and Harvard.

There are many benefits of WordpressMU. One install will provide you with as many blogs as you have hardware resources for. All the blogs install into one database as well, making backups up very easy. Lastly, with just one install updates are a breeze. It is just as easy up dating one blog as it is a 1000 blogs.

Steps.

Step 1) Download WordpressMU.
Step 2) Setup a blank MySQL database, user, and password. Note the hostname of the server as well.
Step 3) Run the install. This is almost identical to the normal Wordpress install.

Tip. For large installs, run your MySQL on a separate box. I run a centralized MySQL server for all my web servers. It allows me to allocate a ton of ram to MySQL and allows for easy maintenance of my many databases. I will talk more about this in a later post.

Tip. There will be a point during the installation where it will prompt you to have your blogs be sub-domains or using a single domain. A single domain is far easier to get setup, especially if you are new to DNS editing or Wordpress.

Tweak. Because I work for a school district, I like to be control freak and control who has blogs. The normal WordpressMU install allows any user to register and create a blog all willy-nilly. To fix this I remove or rename the wp-signup.php file from the main folder of WordpressMU. I also remove the links that point to the setup process. These links are located within the home.php file located in the ‘Home Theme’.

In Part II of “So you want more than one blog?” I will discuss which themes I use and how to tweak them all to use Feedburner without any user setup.