Playing The Host: A Quick Intro to Wordpress MU

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Website In A Weekend reader and guest post writer Josh Kohlbach is on fire! Josh is creating his own design business in Australia… and still has time to contribute another guest post. WordPress.com runs on WordPress MU (“MU” means “multi-user”), something I’ve been curious to explore, but haven’t made time for. Here’s what Josh has to say about WordPress MU.

Playing The Host: A Quick Intro to Wordpress MU

-by Josh Kohlbach

Fancy yourself a bit of a web designer?

Ever wonder how Wordpress.com hosts millions of blogs on their website?

Want to create your own network of blogs that is super easy to manage?

Here’s a little secret for you as long as you don’t tell…

Along with running my blog Code My Own Road, I also blog about small business website design and fancy myself a bit of a freelance website designer.

This is a startup that I’ve only just started so it’s really a work in progress with only a few clients so far.

But when it came down to choosing a consistent platform for me to design my client’s websites around I wanted to get the decision right the first time around. I’m sure you can guess what my choice was: Wordpress. All the way.

It’s actually quite easy to have a template Wordpress installation setup to make new site setups easy – it really isn’t that hard to clone a wordpress install – but I didn’t really want to be setting up hosting, domains, and have hundreds of logins to remember for many many wordpress backends when my clients need follow up work.

I almost thought all was lost when I stumbled across Wordpress MU (pronounced ‘mew’ like the greek letter). The MU in Wordpress MU actually stands for Multi-User.

Wordpress MU essentially turns your regular Wordpress installation into a system containing many Wordpress installations from one hosting platform, one back end and conveniently for me, one login to manage them all.

It’s is a free multi user implementation of Wordpress that lets you host multiple Wordpress websites on one domain. Similar to how Wordpress.com is setup.

When you’re setting Wordpress MU up you can use one of two methods:

The Sub-Directory Method

Your main website – like Website-In-A-Weekend.net – remains the same, which people can visit as normal. This is the base website of your Wordpress MU installation.

From here you can have a whole new Wordpress instance for each subdirectory. For example if Dave were to ever open a membership area, using Wordpress MU he could create an entirely new Wordpress instance in Website-In-A-Weekend.net/members/ in a matter of seconds.

This would allow him to load a new theme, utilize different plugins, categories, pages, tags, and generally just manage it seperately from the main blog.

This is the power of Wordpress MU. Multiple users, one backend. You can even set users up with access to just single backends. Or just author access to single backends.

The Sub-Domain method

The Sub-Domain method is similar in features, but is probably the wider used option.

Continuing with our membership side example, using the sub domain method the address for the new Wordpress instance would be members.Website-In-A-Weekend.net.

Dave can still select a whole new theme, plugins, users and more – giving him full control to set this up as a seperate site.

Great so far! What?! It get’s better?

Pointing A Domain Name At Each Wordpress Instance

Yes, you can even make it appear like you have an entirely new domain and still manage everything from your centralised location.

For example, Dave might eventually want to start a blog about horses (Who knows! I’m just going by the smile on his face in his sidebar pic.) and call it Horse-Riding-In-A-Weekend.net.

He could host his new blog on the same hosting account as Website In A Weekend, manage it from the one administration area, and make it appear like it’s a whole new site on a seperate server. Something which could save him hundreds of dollars in hosting fees.

Pretty neat trick right?

The only catch is you can only do this with the Sub Domain method. There are several plugins that extend Wordpress MU’s functionality to allow domain handling and my favourite is Donncha’s Domain Mapping Plugin.

I’ve tested this kind of implementation on several client sites so far and it works wonderfully. I’m able to administer their sites from the comfort of one administration console, and they get a site that appears on a domain name of their choice. The best of both worlds.

A Few Of Points To Remember

Keeping these three tips in mind will help you succeed with WordPress MU.

1. This isn’t for the feint hearted. I’ve had to experiment – a lot. Especially with finding compatible plugins to do things like sitemap generation, SEO, META tag handling, and more. Be prepared to tinker and I would suggest having some PHP experience to understand how to modify certain plugins to do the things you want them to do with a multi user install.
2. One installation with many instances of Wordpress might sound daunting, but once you get your head around it and especially if you have a little bit of technical knowledge, you’ll find it ok. Structurally it’s the same as Wordpress – there’s just an extra layer to combine many instances of Wordpress.
3. Make sure your hosting package handles unlimited bandwidth and storage. I use Bluehost with no problems so far. Though I am planning on only hosting a limited number of sites per hosting account.

I hope you enjoyed your first – very brief – intro to Wordpress MU. I know when I first discovered it I had ideas popping up left, right and center about what I could do with it. Since then I’ve actually implemented some of those ideas and so far so good.

Questions? Just leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Josh Kohlbach is an Aussie web designer/programmer, & entrepreneur. In between thinking up ludicrous things to do with Wordpress, he writes two blogs: Code My Own Road about Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurship, and small business website design for helping small business owners with their websites.

Tagged as: Josh Kohlbach, WordPress MU