SEO, if you aren’t aware, stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is important, as we want search engines to find us (usually) and index our content fully so they can serve it up in their searches. Optimization does not guarantee results. While it can certainly help get your site higher up in ranking and search results, like I tell my kids, we can’t all be first. The real key is content - if you have a lot, and it’s good, the search engines will gobble you up. The optimization part is really just tweaking. It is not a be-all and end-all.

Default Settings
The most important thing you need to know about WPMU: it has a privacy option. This is available on signup, and also in the admin area of each blog, under Settings -> Privacy.

The first option is default; the second adds a “no-index” to the header of the blog. This will keep search engines from listing the blogs AND it will also keep that blog out of any sitewide listing as well.

I have found the WordPressMU-based sites get indexed quickly and frequently by search engines, without any extra help at all. Remember, WPMU does not merely add more blogs, everything is multiplied. The search engines will recognize what’s going on, and will be made aware that the content on the site will be changing frequently, and in some cases near-constantly. As a side note: I have seen search engine crawlers bring down WPMU-based sites simply by crawling them so often.

Permalinks: if you like, you can set the permalinks to something other than the default using Deanna’s Blog Defaults plugin. If you’re really set on leaving it, you can use the disable menus plugin to disable user access so they can’t change it later.

The Difference between Subdomains and Subfolders
You should have noticed during the installation process that you can pick between subfolders (or subdirectories, same thing) or subdomains when you install. How do search engines treat either setup? In a nutshell, what I have learned is the following:

Subdomain: each blog is seen as a separate site from the main site, as long as there is not too much interlinking going on. Page Rank is retained on a per blog basis.
Subfolder: each blog is seen as part of the main site, as if it were its own category or page. Page Rank seems to be inherited from the main site.

Themes & plugins
I am of the opinion that while there are plugins that handle SEO, many of the options that affect this are theme-based, and one should pick SEO themes to start with. This will cut down on the amount of processing done on the entire site. Remember, everything is multiplied, not added. If our theme is handling H1/H2 headings properly, then we won’t need to add extra overhead to the entire site by enabling a plugin to make the headings have the proper tags.

I tend to not use any SEO-specific plugins on WPMU-based sites, unless and until I know for sure that some pages are being excluded for no good reason I can determine. The All-in-One SEO pack seems to work okay in WPMU. The problem is, the generic user may not know how to use it. If you are using a particular theme that has SEO options built in, then an SEO plugin in tandem is complete overkill.

There are also many sitemap generator plugin for WordPress, that simply don’t work properly with MU. They can’t distinguish between the blogs. I have also found that sitemap generation can slow down the blogs. I haven’t fully tested DDSitemap Gen, but it seems to work and as an added bonus you can insert a shortcode in a page and generate a human-readable sitemap.

I am not sure how sitemaps work on subfolder blogs. Logically, I would think they’d include all the subblogs as part of the main site.

It really is a payoff that you may need to think hard about: which do you want, a fast site, or one that is SEO’d to the gills? Most of the time, you can shoot for the middle and do fine. If the main point of your site is to build a community, then you should not spend a lot of time on SEO. Pick some good themes, have the blogs public, and get your users posting as much as possible. Search engines will love you.

I do know the the premium plugin here works. SEO & Sitemaps

If you really want to improve your SEO skills in WordPress in general, then I’d have to recommend IttyBiz’s Ninja SEO school. It’s pretty freakin’ awesome and she swears like a sailor. I heart her so much. Plus the ebook is extremely good.

Onward to stats
Some people are stats crazy (hello!) and love to see what’s going on in all kinds of different ways. There’s a built-in function we can use that pulls the number of blogs and users.

We can call this function in a theme file by pasting it in wherever we want it to appear.

That’s pretty simple though, what if we want Analytics? I showed you how to write a simple plugin to hook into the footer here, then you can paste in your GA code. Or, just get this plugin. This will track every blog on the site, and you can see which blogs are popular by drilling down the GA menus.

But you can also use a plugin to let your users track their blogs with Google Analytics too.

There are a few stats plugins for WPMU, and one regular stats plugin that has been reported to work in MU.
Fimii WPMU Stats
Wibstats Statistics for WPMU

StatsPress Reloaded

I haven’t tried any of these extensively myself. Most of the users I manage who are interested in stats were happy with Sitemeter code in a widget. Sometimes a third-party will do.

Feel free to share any of your own SEO advice, or any stats plugins you’ve tried - good and bad.

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Working with a single large export file can be difficult. Use this plugin to create multiple export files that contain sections of your blog. This plugin has been tested on WP versions 2.7 - 2.8 & WPMU 2.7.X.

All restriction options provided in the plugin are optional. If no restrictions are selected, this plugin generates the same export file as the export feature built into WP & WPMU.

Features

Export by any combination of:

• Date Range - Start & end month/year
• Author - Same as WP/WPMU built-in export
• Category - Export a specific category
• Content type - Choose either posts or pages
• Post status - Choose Draft, Published, Scheduled or Private

Screenshot

The plugin can be downloaded from the plugin repository. (HT: Trent who did some early testing for me )

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We’ll need to think about our users and what they will be doing, and how they will use the site. Maybe you already know of a few themes and plugins you’ll be needing for sure: P2 for a twitter-like site or comicpress if you’re starting a webcomic network.

Themes
Generally speaking, any WordPress theme will work on WPMU. However, there are a few things to look out for and change or fix so they are polished up and presentable. Since users cannot edit themes and each themes is shared by whomever picks it, things like this:

About Me:
edit sidebar.php to replace this text

is something you are going to want to remove from a theme. Users can’t edit that, and even if they could, the same text will show up for everyone. You will also want to get rid of any sponsored links, encrypted footers, or just plain jacked-up theme code. You’ll know this by checking out your error logs periodicaly. (I’ve seen themes calling non-exisitant images they don’t need) Plus make sure the themes have wp_head in the header file and wp_footer in the footer file, and that themes are localized if you’re going to offer different languages.

You can also use the 100 theme pack, but the down side is you’ll be offering the same 100 themes as hundreds of other sites. I have had users tell me they signed up to homeschooljournal.net just because of the themes that were offered. I have a page off the main blog showcasing the available themes. Wordpress.com, for example, rarely adds new themes and had has the same small number of themes available for ages. If you’re familiar with svn, they’ve made their themes available here.

Some extra theme bells and whistles you may want to do is adding a custom header option or widgetizing sidebars or other areas.

The official theme repository has plenty of tags to search themes by, and generally speaking the themes there are safe to use, in terms of encryption & sponsored links. Please, ALWAYS leave the designer credit in the themes. It’s hard work and many are produced for free, so give credit where it is due. If a theme gets popular on your site, then the designer gets a lot of love as well.

If you decide to buy a premium theme, please make sure you ask about any licensing restrictions before you buy. Some shops insist you buy a developer’s license to make the theme available for use on all blogs. I prefer shops with a GPL license, as then I can do what I like with the themes in question.

Plugins
Here’s the tricky bit: while many plugins for WordPress work in a WPMU setup, many do not. There is no list of plugins that do or don’t work, and also no real hard and fast rule as to why some don’t, or usually do not behave in an expected manner.

Where to find plugins? Well, in the official repo, I look at the tags for wordpressmu or wpmu to find ones specific to that. Otherwise, if a regular plugin comes up and looks interesting, I test it. That’s right, you may actually have to test plugins on your site. The real test is if you activate a plugin on two separate blogs and save the options. If that works out fine, then the plugin works on WPMU. Another place is wpmudev.

You may want to provide your users with popular plugins, or ones with specific features. User like to network, so make it easy for them with twitter plugins, or the awesome commentluv. Depending on the audience, you may want ad-sharing or Amazon widgets. Will they be embedding videos on WPMU? How about a plugin to make each blog look right on the iphone? And of course, some setups might want further privacy options.

There’s a dizzying array of plugins available, so to make it easy on yourself, narrow down the list and start off with a just a few for launch and then as your site grows you can add a new theme or plugin each month or week, as time permits. This keeps your users interested in your site, and they won’t feel constricted.

If you have a support forum or ticketing system, feedback from your users can be invaluable. You won’t have to spend a lot of time trying to guess what they want, as they will tell you.

So to recap: give your users what they expect, and also a few extras.

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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This is the install message from the single WordPress install. This is not what you should see when installing WordPressMU. Why does it show this? Because within the code of both versions, it looks up a directory for existing installs. This is used in single WP to have the files out of the root, but the blog running off the root. If you do click it, you will wind up in what we call “Install Hell”.

So how do we get around this to install WPMU? Well, you could temporarily remove or rename the wp-config.php file in the other WP install. This will bring down your other site until you put it back. I realize this is not ideal for many people, but it is a quick and dirty way, plus it’s easy.

So! Let’s go hack MU - it’s only used once and doesn’t matter if it gets overwritten on upgrade, as we only use it the once.

Open the file wp-blog-header.php, it is in the root folder of the WPMU files.

Comment out line 9:

“if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-config.php’) && !file_exists( dirname( dirname(__FILE__) ) . ‘/wp-config.php’)) {”

then go to line 24, which is “}” and comment it out too. That’s the end of that particular command.

To comment out these lines, put a // at the beginning of them.

That should allow the real WPMU install screen to show up. Make sure you have deleted any htacess file & wp-config file (if they were created) in the MU root before installing again. Now when you return to your URL, you should definitely see a much longer and different install form.

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Included debug information:

* Show template file viewing
* Display page/query load times
* Display all queries executed w/ load times
* Enable WP_Debug
* Show all phpinfo
* WP_Query and WP array values
* included files
* included functions
* declared classes
* HTTP Headers
* defined constants
* current cookies
* values in $_SERVER
* values in $_ENV
* values in $_SESSION
* values in $_POST
* values in $_GET
* values in $_REQUEST

WP-Devel plugin for wordpress and wordpressmu.

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The home page of the entire site is actually controlled by the theme of the main blog. So for anything you want to show up there, the theme is what we’ll need to edit.

By default, the main blog is assigned a theme called “Home”. It is exactly the same as the default theme with one exception: it has a file called home.php in it. From reading the codex about theme template hierarchy, we can see this overrides the main index file of the theme. Great! This will mean we can have all our main blog featured if we want, or we can shuffle the posts off to another page.

Because everyone gets this theme when they install, and we want to stand out, the first thing you’ll have to do is a pick a theme. But first, let’s note the extras in case we want to add them to our new theme.

- the signup page link
- code for the last 5 updated blogs

Now comes the often lengthy process of picking a theme for the home page. You have probably noticed there is a severe lack of WPMU home themes. This is mostly because you can use any WordPress theme you like - we’re just adding sitewide WPMU-specific features. Since some of you may spend a long time picking out themes like I do (hours, days even), and the array is dizzying, my simple recommendation is to just go find a free magazine type theme you like.

45+ Free premium magazine or grid layout wordpress themes
Best free magazine themes
The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available

And just pick one! The main point here is to learn some techniques that you can apply when you do the inevitable redesign.

Upload your chosen theme to the themes folder. If you’ve never worked with WPMU before, you will have to enable the theme for use before you can activate it. Under the Site Admin menu is a Themes sub-menu. If you check Yes here, it enables the theme for any blog on the system. We want to enable it just for the main blog, so here’s how to do that. Enable a theme just for one blog.

The second thing you will notice is the theme editor is disabled in WPMU by default. I have since become more comfortable with editing the theme directly on the server instead. This is still a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method, as one wrong misplaced comma and the front of your site is now a WSOD. Alternatively, you can make your theme edits locally on your computer and transfer them over.

Before we get into much editing, we need to know *what* we’ll be editing. The main page of your site has 3 main purposes:

1 - to pull people further into the site by highlighting sitewide activity
2 - to encourage them to sign up
3 - to show at a glance what the site is about

In a previous post, I went over the features of the wordpress.com home page and some of the plugins you could use to accomplish similar things. The more common features that appear on WPMU sites are:

sitewide tags (I really like this as you can set up a separate tags blog or set it to pump all the posts to the main blog)
recent member posts
latest members
a login box (login widget here)
a link to the signup page, or a graphic button leading to the same place

Of course, if you are really interested in building a social network, you may have already installed BuddyPress. There are a few BuddyPress themes out there already and some extra BuddyPress plugins for added functionality. The BuddyPress themes are usually widgetized, and BP has widgets which makes it really easy to manage.

If you’ve picked a theme that isn’t widgetized, it’s a fairly straightforward process to add another widgetized “sidebar”. I have taken some themes and changed their boxes featured categories areas into a widgetized area to place some thing completely different and sitewide in there instead. The basic process is adding some code to the theme’s functions.php file to let WP know there’s a new widget area, and also an if statement around the area in the theme you want to widgetize.

Once you have a widgetized area on your main page, you could use one like this Sitewide Featured Member widget to highlight one of your members.

The other sitewide features you may want to take care of are more about the running of your site. You’ll need to take care of spam comments, stop spam blog signups, and possibly set some new blog defaults.

Setting up your home page is probably one of the more important things you’ll do, as it is your visitor’s first impression. Try to not get caught up in adding everything at once, and stick to the basics. The good thing here is because WordPress is so modular, you can start out with a few items and add more as time goes by and your site grows.

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beginners, home page, sitewide plugins, theme, tutorial, wordpress mu, wordpressmu, wpmu

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Before You begin
Before you do anything at all – even install WPMU or pick a host or decide on a logo or color scheme, there’s some preliminary work that needs to be done. Some of these may seems quite obvious, but you’d probably be surprised at the amount of people I have encountered that have only the vaguest sense of what they want out of WPMU and who they are building their site for.

Have a plan
See? Kind of a no-brainer? But seriously – you need some sort of plan, a little bit of a roadmap. The plan I’m talking about does not look like this:

1.install WPMU
2.get lots of users
3.make piles of money

If your plan currently looks like this, well, you’ll have loads of homework. This is a plan doomed to fail. So is “I want to be the next WordPress.Com!” Well, that’s all well and good, but that’s pretty big competition. Why not coexist? Why not start with a little extra? “I want to be the next WordPress.Com for _______ !” Fill in the blank.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that your WPMU site is not going to generate an income. Maybe you work for a non-profit, maybe you have altruistic purposes and a big golden heart. (It’s okay, me too.)

You still need a plan.

This is the part of the initial planning stages where you decide, in general, who you are building your WPMU site for and why. You need to be able to define, ideally to a perfect stranger, exactly what your WPMU site is about, who it is for, and why they should care.
This leads us to -

Know Your Users
At the end of the day, you can have the most professionally done site, the coolest plugins, the best features, the fastest servers, but if you have no users – or worse, unhappy ones – then you have not much to build on.

It is your users that will be the deciding factors for things like added features (plugins) and the look and feel (themes), even things like generating an income for yourself.
If your audience is tech-savvy, they will expect different things from your setup than, say, a bunch of moms. Or seniors. Or children over 13. Or an adult audience. Or university students.
See where I’m going with this?

Define your their needs
Only the most basic information about your setup has to do with you and what you may be getting out of it. As noted above, it’s the users who count. Make them happy, and they will tell others. Make them really happy and they will want to give you money.

Get a piece of paper, open up your word processor, whatever you’re comfortable with, and get writing. This is mostly for your own use and will help to clarify everything, especially if you ask (and answer) the following questions.

1.What is my site about? What’s my niche?
2.Who is my average user?
3.What’s their skill level?
4.What comparable features do they expect?
5.How can I entice them to blog with me?

Mind map it, do a brain dump, draw diagrams if you have to. Try not to get caught up in technical details on the how-tos of features or customizations just yet. The point of the exercise is to define the why. Write it all down, then stop.
And then…

Be familiar with WordPress
I know you’re probably thinking this is even more obvious, but seriously – if you’ve never used the single-user version of WordPress before, or have never tried out blogging at wordpress.com, then go get a blog NOW. Try it out for a while, until you understand at least the basics of how it works and how it all flows together and handles information. (It’s okay, I’ll wait.)
Back? Okay, good.

The reason I’ve mentioned this is not to be condescending, ironically witty, or anything like that, it’s mostly to be practical and prevent you from hurting yourself or your desk, frustrating any designers, long-suffering forum volunteers, or consultants you might hire in the future. I (and others) have run across too many people who want or expect WPMU to do something other than what it does, or to behave in a way it is not intended.

And making it do something it was not designed to do, or work in a way it was not intended, can be seriously painful. Sure, we often say, “It’s php, anything can be done,” but there is also the question of should. There’s also the question of budget, if you happen to be paying someone. Consider it time well spent on research.

A quick overview of what WordPress MU is
To recap: The single-user version of WordPress creates one blog with multiple categories, tags and authors. It can be on your main domain, in a subfolder, or in a subdomain.

The MU version of WordPress creates multiple instances of those single blogs (more or less) in one database. It is a stand-alone separate program, not an add-on.

Out of the box, it has a main or central blog which controls the main landing page of the site. There is an inherent assumption that it will be installed at the root of a domain as the main and only site. Users are based off that main site (yourdomain.com) in one of two formats chosen on installation:
subdomains.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/subfolder/

The first choice is know as a subdomain install and the second option is referred to as a subfolder or subdirectory install. Note this describes the type of user blogs created, not the location of the main program.

There is a Site Admin, who has superpowers over every blog and access to the Site Admin menu, as well as there being an admin user for each blog. Aside from access to the same folders of themes and plugins, sitewide features are NOT included by default. Each blog is a mostly separate entity from the other blogs. They share themes and plugins; they do not share content. The main blog on the system is assigned to the Site Admin upon installation. The site admin user is also created on installation. This can be used as a blog, or the theme can be designed to show a central aggregation of sitewide content. Sometimes we call this the main home page.

While it is very similar to WordPress, it has a few small but important differences. I’ll be going over these as we get to them.

Now we get to your homework
If you’ve already done your research, and you have your niche, you know your users, then your next step will be to pick a host and install Wordpressmu.

Fortunately, I have already written up posts about this previously and don’t have to go in depth again here. See Picking the right webhost and my Installing WordPressMU ebook (it’s FREE).

But I will recap:
- pick a good host, pay attention to the RAM allocated to your account and the host’s TOS. Already have a host? Double-check their TOS about giving away free blogs. If you want subdomains, ask support if they will add it.
- when installing, upload the WPMU files, make an empty database, then visit the front page of the site and follow the instructions.

Shortcut: go get a hosting account at WP WebHost. They host WordPress and WordpressMU *only* and have knowledgeable staff. Their BuddyPlan has more than you will need for a LONG time, and they will even install it for you. You can spend a couple hours with them and $16, plus have plenty of weekend left over. (note: don’t skimp and get the $5 plan, as wildcard subdomains aren’t available on that one) Did I mention the 100 day guarantee?

Hopefully by next Friday you will have a WordPress MU install of your very own, complete with new blog smell. Poke around the backend, set up a test blog, get familiar with the menus. Next week, we’ll start working on the home page and installing sitewide plugins.

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: groundwork, install, Installation, planning, tutorial, wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu

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The rough plan is as follows:
1 - thinking about your end users, picking a host and installation
2 - choosing your front page theme, set up main page features and sitewide plugins
3 - User’s blogs: choosing themes and plugins (widgets) for them
4 - SEO and stats
5 - Securing the site and the server
6 - Promotion and monetization

Since news of the merge, there will likely be more and more people wanting to learn how to make the best use of multi-blogs features, so we thought we’d better get cracking on a series of helpful tutorial posts. I picked Fridays, as I realized most people will probably be doing this in their spare time on the weekends.

You should probably subscribe to the feed so you don’t miss out.

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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You can modify those rewrite rules to work with Buddypress:

• Replace yourbpsignupslug with the slug used for your BP signup (ex. register).
• And, replace yourhomedomain with the domain of you home blog (ex. wpmututorials.com).

Add these rewrite rule before the #uploaded files:


# BEGIN ANTISPAMBLOG REGISTRATION
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .yourbpsignupslug*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourhomedomain.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) http://die-spammers.com/ [R=301,L]
# END ANTISPAMBLOG REGISTRATION


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Most of the programming that I’ve done in the last 20 years has been modifying other people’s code. Recently, I have worked mostly with WPMU but a few years ago I was writing plugins and theme functions for WP. After some thought on the task of merging the WP & WPMU codebases I felt that the easiest route would be to modify WPMU so that it would run on the WP database structure without altering the WP data.

The process that I followed was

• Fresh install of WP 2.7.1
• Wrote the second post in the blog
• Move the WP folder and replaced it with a WPMU 2.7.1 install
• Edited the wp-config to use the WP database
• Worked my magic without modifying any of the WP tables or WPMU core files
• a line in wp-config + 2 plugins = wpmu running on wp install
• buddypress member on wpmu over wp
• Buddypress home on wpmu over wp
• edit apache vhost document root + restart = back to WP from WPMU (to verify that the WP DB remained intact)

I’m fairly sure that quite a few people are interested in knowing specifically what I did. I’m familiar with that feeling. However, having had a day or so to give it some thought, developing a common code base which would run on either a WP or WPMU database would be a nice to add to my list of accomplishments. Those interested in the potential of the common code base could purchase a support subscription at musupport.net. Enough subscriptions would allow Andrea & I to reduce our client load such that I could dedicate more time to a common code base.

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Post tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wp-wmpu merge, wpmu

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