So this morning I presented at Wordcamp Montreal. I tried to keep it very participatory, and hope that my audience learned as much from me as I learned from some of my audience members. In fact, I’m still there, so I’ll make this brief.
My presentation was called WP-MU 101: How to Install & Avoid Common Mistakes. WP-MU is the a multi-user version of the WordPress platform that (1) does everything WordPress does, but can (2) scale to tens of millions of page views a day, and (3) manage unlimited users and blogs.
Although WP-MU and regular WordPress will soon be merged under a single platform, they are still separate platforms with separate installation and configuration processes. So my presentation was intended to help others learn from my mistakes (i.e. not reading the installation instruction), and I set out to give the audience an understanding of:
- Intro: Why WPMU?
- Common Installation Mistakes: WP vs WPMU
- Choices: directory vs subdomain
- Configuring WP-MU: creating blogs and applying themes
This PowerPoint isn’t nearly as rich in detail as the discussion that ensued. I am NOT a developer or web designer, and my presentation was very much a beginner’s level one. So I actually had to crowd-source a chunk of the Q&A session because many of the questions were beyond my technical expertise. And during that discussion, some of the things I learned were:
- the qTranslate plugin will let you use WP-MU to manage different blogs in different languages.
- a single installation of WP-MUÂ can actually manage blogs across multiple domains — create a new blog through WP-MU (such as blog.domain.com), point your new domain (example.com) at the same server root where WP-MU is installed, go to the general blog setting for blog.domain.com and change the URL there to example.com.
In any case, if you have any questions about WP-MU, please leave me a comment and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll try to put you in touch with someone who does.
If you need any help, you can send them my way. I couldn’t be there this weekend. :-/