If you’ve got WordPress 3.0, you’ve already got MU.  It just needs you to change one line of wp-config.php!  If you’ve already got sites up and running, and on a different domain, there are a few more steps involved.  Here’s what I did, with some links to site where I found help, like this great overview.

The Scenario

I have upgraded littlestorping.co.uk to WordPress 3.0 and I have some sites on other domains I’d like to run off the same WordPress install.

Enabling Multi-site in WordPress

The implications of switching multi-site on are significant enough that the WordPress folk don’t want people accidentally flicking a switch in settings, so you have to change wp-config.php.  But all you have to do is add the line:

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

You can get things going by visiting the Tools menu and selecting Network. I found helpful information at WPbeginner. When switching on you can select whether new sites appear in subdirectories or subdomains. I wasn’t given the option of subdirectories (something to do with my setup) but I wanted subdomains anyway.  I then got told by WordPress I should change my site’s URL from www.littlestorping.co.uk to littlestorping.co.uk. I wasn’t clear why, but I think it was because leaving the www would mean that the subdomains would be example.www.littlestorping.co.uk rather than example.littlestorping.co.uk.  I wasn’t wild about having to do that, however www.littlestorping.co.uk redirects to littlestorping.co.uk anyway, and some people (eg. Matt Mullenweg) prefer to lose the www anyway.  So I’ve changed, but I suspect that one or two plugins and related services may still be affected.

Wildcard DNS

For the subdomain thing to work, you need to have Wildcard DNS enabled.  I thought I didn’t have Wildcard DNS (my host’s FAQ said – need Wildcard DNS?  Just ask!).  It turns out all I needed to do was create a new subdomain *.littlestorping.co.uk and the rest took care of itself.  I’d like to point out here, that my hosts got back to me in less than one hour on a Sunday.  I have a very low cost package with them, and their email support is outstanding, so I’d recommend without reservation checking out 5quidhost if you’re looking for someone to host your WordPress site.

If you’re not sure if you’ve got wildcard DNS, pick a subdomain you haven’t set up, eg. brillig.littlestorping.co.uk. If it’s on you’ll be redirected to littlestorping.co.uk but if not you’ll get a server not found message.

Having set activated the “network” in WordPress, you should see a new Super Admin menu above your dashboard.  This is where you can control all your sites!  I went to Super Admin > Sites and under add sites specified test as the subdomain in the address, stuck a title in, hit the button, and created a test site at test.littlestorping.co.uk.  It shows up by default in the new TwentyTen theme. Cool!

Preparing to Move

The next step is to bring your existing site that is currently hosted in its own install into this one.  So, for example, www.example.co.uk will become example.littlestorping.co.uk in the new install.  Later we’ll give it back the www.example.co.uk, but for now we’re going to have to put that on hold.

In my case, www.example.co.uk is an add-on domain.  The site itself is stored in a subdirector /example, and is accessible at littlestorping.co.uk/example, and example.littlestorping.co.uk as well as www.example.co.uk.  Because in the WordPress settings, I’ve set the URL as www.example.co.uk, as soon as you start using the site, the domain will switch to www.example.co.uk.  The next step is to go, in the WordPress install for this site, to Settings > General and change the site address to the equivalent of littlestorping.co.uk/example.  For now this means that it’s still accessible via all three addresses, but all its internal links now point to the subdirectory version.  This is important, because we’re going to switch off both www.example.co.uk and example.littlestorping.co.uk for the moment, and we still want the site to function.

This is probably a good point to export your the site you’re moving.  In its WordPress install go to Tools > Export and download the export file.

Moving

In your hosts’ CPanel or equivalent, remove the add-on domain www.example.co.uk.  Then, if necessary, remove the example subdomain.

In your new WordPress 3.0 install, where all your sites are going to live together, go to Super Admin > Sites and add a new site with example as the subdomain, ie. at example.littlestorping.co.uk in my example.  You’ll need to set the title and subtitle to match the site you’re moving, WordPress won’t do this for you.  Then in the list of sites, for example.littlestorping.co.uk click on Backend.  This changes everything below the Super Admin menu to refer to the site you’ve just created.  If you click “Add Post” now, it will be added to example.littlestorping.co.uk.

Go to Tools > Import and click on WordPress.  Locate the file you exported before and pull it in.  Have the import copy all your files – this will make your master WordPress install go and fetch them and manage their organisation.  You will therefore be able to safely delete /example when you’re done.

Set the right theme and install and/or enable the appropriate plugins for the site, and that should be it.  You can see the migrated site at example.littlestorping.co.uk and the old site at littlestorping.co.uk/example and compare them to check it’s all worked.  If so, it’s safe to delete /example, and the old site’s tables in your database.

Domains

The final step is to get www.example.co.uk pointing back at our site.  We will need to get a plugin for this: it’s WordPress MU Domain Mapping (well, you don’t need a plugin, but it makes life easier).  Installing this is slightly more complicated than usual: sunrise.php needs to go into /wp-content, and another edit to wp-config.php is required to add the line define('SUNRISE','on'); as described in the plugin’s installation instructions.

We’ll also need to park our domain with our host.

Then in the master WordPress install, go to the Backend for example.littlestorping.co.uk and within it, to Tools > Domain Mapping. This is the place where you can enter your domain: www.example.co.uk (you can enter a primary domain and as many others as you like, for example I also added example.co.uk).  That should do it!  Your site URL gets updated and you should now find whether you go to example.littlestorping.co.uk or example.co.uk you get redirected to www.example.co.uk as soon as you start using the site.

That’s It

More or less.  I only had a couple of problems with this, it was a very smooth process and has simplified managing my sites. Most of the menus for either site are unaffected – it’s just the Site Admin menu that you’ll see (if you are one!) and the Network Activate button on plugins.  If you have even just a couple of WordPress sites, I would recommend combining just to simplify maintenance.

I’ve been looking at commenting systems over the past couple of days.  This is motivated partly by curiosity (a vast number of sites I look at offer login via something called Disqus) and partly because I think it would be neat if the conversations could be brought back together.  Here are some of the advantages systems like IntenseDebate and Disqus (the two of looked at) can offer:

1. As a commenter you can log in with your WordPress/IntenseDebate/Disqus, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID identity.
2. When you make a comment it can be tweeted out to your followers as well. They’ll see not just a link to the post but also (the first part of) your comment.
3. Discussion elsewhere (eg. on Twitter) gets pulled back in so everyone reading the post can also see the discussion.
4. As a commenter you get a lot of control over the information you share about yourself, not just linking to your own website (as is typical on a comment) but also to your social network profiles etc.
5. As a commenter you get a lot of control over how the comments are displayed to you.
6. Commenters’ profiles are also linked to all their other comments.  So if someone has said something interesting in response to a post, you can see what else they’ve been reading and what comments they’ve made on it.

There are probably other things, those interested me the most.

There are some alternatives that can do just some of these things, and there are some drawbacks:  There are plugins for WordPress that do 1 & 2.  (And, it turns out, 3).  And the drawback with 6 is that it only applies where the commenter has commented on another blog that also uses the same commenting system (the classic dilemma for social networks/IM systems/mobile phones etc.)

Yesterday the Independent adopted Disqus.  Now, I don’t read the Indy, but it was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.  I installed Disqus on the blog, and it’s there now.  But it might not be in a couple of hours.  There are some niggles, in ascending order of niggliness:

• Reactions (which I call mentions) didn’t show up at first (though they do now).
• A comment from 2007 got duplicated (but just the one!)
• The counter which tells you how many comments (and mentions) there are before you go and look is ALWAYS wrong. Grrrr.
• And (most seriously) it appears to have borked comments for those viewing the mobile version of the site.

Also I don’t yet know to what extent I’ll be able to style the comments back how I want them (they’re functional and usable, but I want them to fit in with the Little Storping aesthetic!)

I can just switch Disqus off anytime.  All the comments get duplicated into the WordPress system anyway.  So, if I can do 1, 2 and 3 (using the Backtype plugin) how much value should I place on 4, 5 and 6.

Maybe the most important thing is what the users think…  Oh. Ahem. Um, comments, please?

This is partly about aesthetics (if you’re on newer versions of Firefox or Safari it should look nice and curvy) but also about clarity and focus: I’ve tried to bring to the fore the latest content in a range of categories – and media!

A few weeks ago I was out with friends, and one said to me (let us call her Alice) “I had a look at your blog and but I don’t get it”.  She’d been recommended to it by a regular reader but “it seems awfully like a round robin”.  This prompted some reflection on my part, since I know a blog should have purpose, focus, and regularity so that readers know what to expect.

The thing is, I don’t want to have to be restricted in what I post, and I know if I start different blogs (one on the experiences of an amateur gardener, one on my views on Doctor Who, one on whichever locale I happen to be residing in) they’ll just end up festering.  Little Storping, after all, goes through fairly lengthy droughts even though I allow myself to post on just about anything.  So I use categories: and you can follow whichever category you’re interested in through its page or its RSS feed.

So I in this redesign, I’m thinking about how I make it easier for people to follow categories (I’m also thinking about my hierarchy of categories, and how to improve it).  Latest posts grouped by “top” level categories now appear on the front page, and I’ll add links for the RSS feeds very soon.  I’m also going to start tagging: I didn’t used to think this was worth investing the time in, and having not used them I felt reticent about starting.  This is an opportunity to do that!

The sidebar is now purely focused on my latest content: but not just the latest posts on the blog, also my latest photographs (from Flickr), my latest bookmarks (from Delicious) and my latest Tweets (although this has been on the sidebar for a few weeks already!)

To achieve this I’ve been using some new plugins:

• Category Posts Widget provides the latest posts in each category for the front page (I created several instances: one for each category; I intend to write a widget to do this automatically)
• Alternate Recent Posts Widget shows the latest posts on the sidebar but excludes those displayed on the page already
• Flickr Photo Album (with extensive customisation to integrate it with the new theme and Lightbox) displays photo galleries and the latest pics in a sidebar widget
• Del.icio.us for WordPress Widget pulls in my bookmarks
• Twitter Tools displays my Twitter feed in the sidebar as well as tweeting each time I publish a new post.

So I’m going to make two changes here in the village of Little Storping. Firstly, for a trial period, I’m removing the requirement to register in order to comment (I originally used this to avoid comment spam). Secondly, any user who hasn’t yet commented on a post will have their registration deleted. Don’t worry if you haven’t commented yet – that’s what this post is for! Make sure you’re logged in and just stick a comment below saying, well, whatever you like, in the next 48 hours, and I’ll believe you’re human.

My apologies to those of you who miss this post and haven’t commented before midday (BST) Sunday 19th October. Of course, you don’t now need to re-register, but I like it if you do, and it allows you to edit your comments if you need to (and, of course, add and edit recipes in the Happy Ploughman!)

Update: I’ve carried out a slightly less radical cull that originally planned, removing everyone who hadn’t posted and who had an @gmail.com or @gmx.com address. I’m not picking on you guys, it’s just that’s where most of the spam seems to come from (I’m surprised gmail doesn’t filter them out…). Anyway, it’s still cut the number of registered users by 75%, and I know most of the rest of you are human…

Edit: practising editing and getting used to photo orientation (taking photos with the app isn’t as intuitive as it could be). I notice the iPhone keyboard doesn’t seem to have the thingies for doing HTML…

Thank you for your patience!

Here goes.

Update, 13.18: All seems to be working, but please post any issues!

Finally I’ve got round to the redesign. I’m using the theme 2cgreen, hacked about a bit to include the Little Storping picture and to make it widget friendly. I’ve probably got a bit more hacking to get it exactly how I want, but I’m quite pleased with it so far.

It’s on probation at the moment. Comments welcome.

The wiki is powered by wikiwiki, based on erfurt wiki but using WordPress’s authentication. I’ve tinkered and hacked away a bit to make it fit with the theme (plus a modification to functions.php as described here). I need to hack away at it a bit more: I’m not happy with the English localisation (if you get some odd English, I didn’t do it – honest!), but I wanted to launch it right away, after adapting Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiced baked desert apple recipe for my pears – for my adaptation click here.

I am allowing all registered users of Little Storping to be able to edit the wiki as I’d like to have as much user contribution as possible.

So go on, dive in!