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

Choosing to optimize your site


WordPress MU is a resource-hungry web application. This isn't a reflection on the people who have worked on it or the quality of the code, rather it is more of a side effect of how powerful WordPress MU is. As an administrator of a WordPress MU-powered site, you are giving your users the ability to run their own web sites—something that was pretty difficult for an individual to do even just a few years ago.

You can set up your site and test it on a good shared hosting package. But if you get more than a few users, you'll quickly hit the limits of what a shared host will allow you to do. Really, to run a WordPress MU site that will get more than a handful of visitors, you need a VPS or, ideally, a dedicated server.

Shared hosting packages are relatively inexpensive; however, the low cost is offset by the fact that your site is located on the same physical server as hundreds of other sites. If any of the sites on the server use an excessive amount of resources...