Chapter 1, Getting Started with WordPress Multisite, will cover activating WordPress multisite from a single-site installation, and other basic tasks.

Chapter 2, Customization, will guide you in installing and configuring themes and plugins. We'll also go over how to create a custom author-listing directory.

Chapter 3, User Management and Permissions, will help you understand what the Super Administrator is and everything it can do. We'll also touch on individual site management and go over other user roles and permissions.

Chapter 4, Protecting Your Multisite Network, will focus on the best practices for keeping your multisite installation secure; from plugins to password protection with the .htaccess files.

Chapter 5, Migrating Multiple WordPress Blogs to a Multisite Network, will cover everything you need to bring multiple, single-site WordPress blogs over to a multisite network. Makes updating everything at once really easy.

Chapter 6, Site Optimization, will cover various ways you can enhance the performance of your sites. Everything from using CDN services like CloudFlare to caching plugins for WordPress.

Chapter 7, Troubleshooting and Maintaining Stability, will focus on common problems and fixes for those problems. We'll also go over backups and updating WordPress.

You'll need to have a place to host your website, first of all. If you don't have a webhost, you can follow along by installing a web server, PHP, and MySQL on your computer. This can be achieved through a variety of methods, including Google LAMP, and you'll find many options.

You'll also need some sort of FTP client; I use FileZilla throughout the book. A text editor or other code editor will also be needed; I used Sublime Text in the book.

This book is geared towards people who have some experience with WordPress already. You don't need to know anything about WordPress multisite, though.

People who run multiple WordPress single-site installations will be especially interested, since we cover how to migrate those single sites over to a multisite network. Merging all your sites into one network makes updating and general maintenance really, really easy.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "There's a comment in there that says Multisite and directly under it is where we define the named constant, WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE, to true."

A block of code is set as follows:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

/* Multisite */
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Specify your Network Title and Admin E-mail Address values, and click on the Install button at the bottom of the form."

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