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

Performing a safe upgrade


WordPress MU will usually display a message in the admin panel informing you when an upgrade is available and offering you the chance to upgrade immediately. This feature is very convenient and can save you a lot of time when it works. However, it does not work well on all web server setups and, when it goes wrong, it can cause a lot of problems.

Before you perform any kind of upgrade, you should make a backup. If you already have a backup strategy in place, then you probably already have an up to date backup of your web site's files, as things such as plugins and theme files don't change all that often. Still, your database will need to be backed up.

Before you perform the upgrade, you should put your web site into maintenance mode (which you can do using the Maintenance Mode plugin available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/) so that your users don't add any posts or comments while the upgrade is taking place. Once the site is in maintenance...