So Murkworks.net, my and ‘s home network, now hosts a small number of WordPress blogs. Up till now I’ve been handling this by copying separate installs of WordPress around to various accounts on the system. Which of course means that for every new WordPress blog we host, that’s another mess of WordPress files to keep track of, another set of themes, another set of plugins, etc.
As you might guess, this is messy and inefficient.
There does however seem to be a solution available. WordPress 3 has now dropped, and one of the biggest features of this release is that it’s merged codebases with WordPress MU, the version used to run as many blogs as you like off of one install. Which sounds ideal for our purposes, except for a few problems.
- Almost all of the WordPress blogs we’re hosting have domain names associated with them, such as annathepiper.org, angelakorrati.com, baconforbirds.com, etc.
- All of the blogs are in general hosted on individual accounts, and in some cases are integrated with non-blog content
- All of the blogs are running already on individual installs of WordPress 2.9.2, except for annathepiper.org, onto which I did a test upgrade of WordPress 3 last night (and so far it seems to be working swimmingly)
Here’s what I would ideally like to do:
- Do one (new) install of WordPress 3 in a suitably central location on the system
- Turn on the networking function so it’s aware of all the various hosted blogs
- NOT have to move site-specific content out of the individual accounts that host that content
- Keep our various domain names working and pointing at the various blogs they’re already pointing to
Given what I’ve described of our system here, can anyone tell me if my goal is feasible? Additionally, any tips and best practices you could recommend would be lovely. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!