Multi network wordpress sites

The Benefits of WordPress Multisite

For us, enabling multisite was a huge win. By going with multisite, we were able to take advantage of many benefits. WordPress multisite allows you to:

• Share one custom theme among all of your multisite blogs. We made slight adjustments to each of them using child themes.
• Share one set of authors. There is only one username/password combination for each user, plus one profile to manage.
• Distribute plugins across all blogs, rather than managing them individually for each install. This goes for WordPress updates as well.
• Simplify the blogging process. By logging into one blog, we have access to each of them.

The Process

The actual process of converting a site to multisite (http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network) is pretty easy. It only takes a few minutes. If you are going to do it, however, you should be aware that it will require changes to your .htaccess file and core WordPress configuration files. Be sure to proceed with caution, and make sure you have a backup of your site.
You will need FTP access to your WordPress installation.

Step 1 – Enable Multisite

[Callout "Add define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); to your  wp-config.php file above where it says /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */:"]

Add define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true); to your wp-config.php file to enable multisite.

Once you’ve made the change, save the file, and upload it using FTP into the parent folder of your blog.

Step 2 – Network Setup

You’ve successfully enabled WordPress multisite, but now you will need to make some configurations.

Access the new Network Setup page in your Tools menu.

[Callout "Log into your WordPress site with your administrator account. You should now see that 'Network Setup' has been added to your Tools menu item."]

In the Network Setup area, you will be able to make key decisions about your site.

The major decision that you will need to make will be between sub-domains and sub-directories. It is important to note that once you make this change, you will will not be able to change it.

• Sub-domains: a domain-based network in which on-demand sites use subdomains. (newblog.yourdomain.com)
• Sub-directories: a path-based network in which on-demand sites use paths. (yourdomain.com/newblog)

Because we were already running our blog out of a sub-directory (/blog), we only had one option, and that was to add an additional sub-directory. So, we ended up with:

* /blog – Original marketing blog
* /blog/team – New team blog
* /blog/dev – New development blog

Admittedly, this is not the best structure in the world for SEO purposes, although we believe that it still beats the use of sub-domians, which can have a negative impact on building PageRank. We improved the situation by creating a few custom 301 redirects in our parent .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /bangla /blog/bangla
Redirect 301 /english /blog/english

This allows us to use the short URLs http://sajubd.com/bangla and http://sajubd.com/english to access our blogs. There are better ways to solve this problem, but for us, this was an acceptable solution.

Step 3 – Enabling The Network

Once you’ve made your decision on sub-domains or sub-directories, you will need to make some significant changes to your .htaccess and wp-config.php files. These changes will vary depending upon your specific installation, so be sure to follow the customized WordPress instructions that are provided.

Complete the following steps to enable the features for creating a network of sites.

Once you are done, your wp-config.php and .htaccess files will look something like this:

Add the code that your WordPress installation generates into your wp-config.php

The configuration of your particular .htaccess will vary depending on your network.

[Callout "Complete the instructions provided by WordPress. Once you complete these steps, your network is enabled and configured. You will have to log in again."]

Step 4 – Network Admin Dashboard

Once you have logged back into your WordPress install, you will be able to see a few new menu options in the WordPress Admin Bar.

You will see a whole new world in the Network Admin area of your WordPress menu bar.

From the ‘Network Admin’ dashboard, you will be able to add new sites, and configure your shared plugins, users and themes. There will be some new principles to familiarize yourself with, but the main thing that you need understand is that settings on the network level will automatically apply themselves to the new blogs, unless you specify otherwise. WordPress provides a lot of additional information about how to manage your new WordPress multisite.

Sharing Themes & Plugins

You can share your themes and plugins with all of your new blogs/sites very easily from the Network Dashboard.

By setting a theme to network enable, it will be available throughout all of your new sites.

More about how themes are enabled and shared can be found here. You can see above that we enabled our parent theme and child themes across the entire network. This means that our parent theme will be managed and updated from a single place, while being applied to each of our new blogs. Individual customizations were added for each of the new blogs using a child theme.

Once you have a multisite, plugins can be automatically enabled for each blog, or left to individual installation.

Like themes, plugins can be shared automatically among your blogs, or left to individual installation. It is important to note that the individual settings that the plugins require will be left to the admin panel for each new blog. This allows you to update and manage one installation of the plugin while offering a wide range of setting options.

A Note About Permalinks

The only trouble that we encountered with our multisite conversation was related to the structure of the permalinks. Traditionally, we have always used /blog/%postname%/ for our primary blog. Because we were already using a subdirectory for our blog, WordPress wanted to insert a second /blog subdirectory in our url. Resulting in something like this /blog/blog/%postname%/.
Needless to say, this broke all of the old links on our site. The issue was not easily solved, due to some oddities with WordPress itself. Ultimately the fix for use was as simple as doing things in the correct order:

1. At blog site set Settings -> Permalinks -> Common Setting -> Default
2. At Network Admin -> Sites -> (root site) Permalink Sturcture -> /%category%/%post_id%