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 – featured posts


To add the featured posts to the home page, we will use the Featured Posts plugin available at http://wpmudev.org/project/Featured-Posts.

  1. Extract the plugin to the /wp-content/plugins directory.

  2. Open featured-posts.php and look for the line that says $featured_blogs = array(1,2);. Replace the values in the bracket with the ID of the blogs you would like to feature—for example blogs owned by your fellow administrators. If you don't know the blog IDs, you can find them by looking at Site Admin | Blogs:

  3. Upload the plugin to your site's /wp-content/plugins directory.

  4. Go to Site Admin | Options in the admin panel, and enable plugins (they are turned off by default).

  5. Now go to the Plugins section of the admin panel, look for the Featured Post plugin, and click Activate.

  6. Open the home.php file for the theme you are using on the main site. Inside the main content div (in our case <div id="contentmiddle">), add the following line:

    <h1>Featured Post:</h1&gt...