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

Time for action – displaying the most active blogs


Rather than displaying all the blogs on the site, we will display the most recently updated ones using a plugin called AHP Sitewide Recent Posts, available at http://wpmudev.org/project/AHP-Sitewide-Recent-Posts-for-WPMU.

  1. Download the plugin and extract it to your /wp-content/plugins folder. You may want to rename it to something more recognizable than the default name—for example, recent_posts.php.

  2. Upload the plugin to your web server and enable it in your admin panel.

  3. Open the r_sidebar.php file for the main site's theme.

  4. Add the following code where you want the recent posts to appear. In our case we replaced the list of available themes with it.

    <h2>Recent User Posts</h2><ul>
    	<li><?php ahp_recent_posts(5, 30);  ?></li>		
    </ul>
  5. Upload the changes. You should see a list of recent posts in the sidebar, as shown in the following screenshot:

What just happened?

We installed the AHP Sitewide Recent Posts...