We’re proud to say that we’ve built our new site using WordPress MU. WordPress MU, which stands for multi-user, is a version of WordPress built to host multiple blogs within one site. It’s actually what is used to run WordPress.com - that plus a few server farms. It’s built around the core of WordPress but has a few differences. We chose to use it so that we at Sharpdot could all maintain our own blogs and also to get in a little practice because we’re working to implement a version of WP-MU on Portfolio Atlas sometime in the near future.

Now about those few differences… a couple of them have been troublesome. First off, plugins aren’t always the same. Plugins are the real power of WordPress and many of the ones that we’re used to using have to be implemented in slightly different in WP-MU. For example, MU implements extra security for posting non-basic HTML tags. This caused a problem when creating our services section because we have some DHTML in the bottom of the page and are using a definition list. I found a plugin called TINYMCE Valid Elements which worked great for regular WP but not with MU. So after a little work under the hood, I was able to modify it to work for MU but suffice it to say, this is one of the things to keep in mind.

There are a lot of other slight but troublesome differences when it comes to configuration. I posted earlier about changing to include the www in our domain name, and Mike posted about changing the default permalinks to not include a root /blog/ directory.

One last thing to mention is that we had a tough time with actually logging in as our sub users. That issue turned out to be pretty common and had to do with the requirement for having at least 2 nodes in the tld so that you can run your install using subdomains - like username1.sitename.com and username2.sitename.com . It’s one of those simple RTFM things you might go prematurely bald over! Just remember - you can’t run it at localhost.

All in all though it’s still been a very good decision and a good way to get familiarized before going live on Portfolio Atlas. And of course - it’s all still way simpler than Drupal!


http://www.sharpdotinc.com/jdost/2009/02/09/intro-to-wordpress-mu-vs-wordpress/