Book Image

WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

WordPress MU enables you to build a complete, professional blog network. Each user gets their own blog, and can choose their favorite templates and plug-ins, and develop their own content. WordPress MU powers some of the largest blog networks in the world, including the mighty WordPress.com ñ home to thousands of bloggers. This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com ñ a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves. The book starts with a clean install of WordPress MU, and as you work through the book, you will build the blog network, and add on more and more features, all seamlessly integrated to achieve a professional, custom-built look.You will find new themes and plug-ins added to the site, as well as customization of the WordPress multi-user code. The book will also look at ways you can manage your community, and keep your site safe and secure, ensuring that it is a spam-free, enjoyable community for your users. In the later chapters, you will add a forum using the bbPress script, and add BuddyPress social networking components to your site. Imagine how good you'll feel when your first WordPress multi-user blog network launches.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

More ways to speed up your site—optimizing themes


If you are expecting a lot of traffic to your blog network, then a caching system alone may not be enough to ensure that all your visitors have a good, speedy experience.

Optimizing your theme files is another simple, low-cost way to speed things up. There are a couple of changes that you can make—some reduce the load your site generates on the server, while others simply speed up the loading time that your users will experience.

Spreading the load

If you expect your site to be extremely popular, you may need to spread the load across multiple servers. A simple way to do so is to move frequently accessed files such as images and CSS files to a separate server. The Amazon S3 service is an inexpensive way to do this.

Amazon's S3 service is a "pay as you go" hosting service for static files. You pay only for what you use—a nominal amount per request and a small amount per GB of traffic, with different charges for uploads and downloads. There's...