WordPress MU in action
I previously had three different WordPress installations, and it got a maintenance headache (although upgrades are relatively easy on current WP) and I din’t like fact that I had three different accounts, had to install plugins thrice etc.
Luckily, there’s an edition of WP that allows me to have multiple blog instances on one installation, namely WordPress ยต. I already had a MU up and running (in /mu/-directory), so let’s go importing the pages, posts and comments from old WP’s. And it was… well…almost easy.
- After installation the MU has a “root site” that acts like a normal blog. If you want to have separate blogs, you need to create them. So let’s create new blogs with the same names as I previously had (me, music and blog).
- The first problem was, my previous WPs was too old (shame on me!) to have export feature. So, let’s begin with WP upgrade – on all three! And those old bastards didn’t have the nice Upgrade button on their Dashboard like the current ones do. Not big real really, but some manual work.
- Okay, now I got all three WP’s upgraded and got the export files from them so let’s try the import feature of MU. Seems to work okay. No, now wait. Why the posts from one of my blogs are displayed on the site root? And why the links to pages on that blog do not work? They do work from the root however. So somehow the posts and pages from one blog got to the root site. I tried several tricks and importing the posts again, but nothing helped.
- At this point I found out that my MU is not the latest one, so let’s upgrade first, just hit the Upgrade-link… dammit, it doesn’t work! Manual update then…
- I deleted all the blogs and created them again. Except that now I got a warning message after creating a blog called ‘blog’:”Do you seriously want to this?” Of course I do… and the behaviour is same as before.
- Okay, I have to give up and rename my blog to IT, as it’s mainly devoted to information technology.
- After importing the pages to IT blog, it now works correctly.
- One final problem was with the blog “me”, as it’s written in finnish so it contains scandinavian characters, that somehow got lost during the transitions. Some SQL geekery in mySqlAdmin, and here we are!
- Now, the blog is located in /mu/-directory and I want to move it into the root of the site. Luckily, there seems to be options in WP where I can set the directory. Change that setting, and move the files on the server and..oops, nothing works! Some SQL tricks again…and I can’t get the MU up again!
- So let’s start from the beginning, this time from a fresh MU installation (which was super easy as always with WP), directly to the root and follow exactly the same steps as before, and now it went perfectly.
- The only step remaining now is customizing the homepage so that it lists the newest posts from all the blogs. Ideas, anyone?
Tags: wordpress