Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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WordPress for Mass Production: WordPress MU and BuddyPress
Do you ever think to yourself, “I know thousands of people who would love to blog. I could run a
network of bloggers that size. That would be fun!”? Then WordPress MU is designed just for you.
The standard WordPress software installation can handle multiple blogs with multiple authors.
How many blogs, topics, and authors you build on one WordPress installation is up to you and
only limited by your host's disk space and bandwidth restrictions. WordPress MU (for Multi User)
is for massive blogging operations.
Where you want to use WordPress MU (WPMU) is when you need the capability to create hundreds
or thousands of essentially unrelated blogs. For example, you run a corporate intranet for a fairly
large firm. In a fit of transparency fervor and the urge to generate ideas from everyone, manage-
ment decides to give every employee the ability to blog. Or you're at a big, prestigious university,
like Harvard, with a huge faculty and graduate student population. As the system administrator,
you don't want the responsibility of having to set up every new account, and you don't need to
approve every post. You want to set overall guidelines, have some rules about the overall look-
and-feel, smoothly handle software upgrades across all the individual blogs, and the ability to
define what's required to set up each blog. This is what WPMU provides.
The first and best-known implementation of WordPress MU is WordPress.com. As a user, you only
see one form to set up your account and only the administrative pages for your blog(s). Automattic
handles the rest of the overhead.
A relatively new add-on to WPMU is BuddyPress. This predefined set of plug-ins adds social net-
working features to a WPMU installation. Users can create profiles, update their status (as on
Facebook or Twitter), link to friends inside the blog network, set up groups, and have a private
messaging area.
You can try all this out now at http://mu.wordpress.org, or you can wait a bit. At WordCamp San
Francisco in 2009, Matt Mullenweg announced that all of MU's features would be merged into core
WordPress in some future release. As of this writing, the timing remains undefined.
To see some outstanding examples of WordPress MU, go to http://wordpress.org/showcase/
flavor/wordpress-mu. For all things BuddyPress, see www.buddypress.org.
Hosting WordPress Yourself
You can install the WordPress software on any computer with web server software installed, even if
that computer has no permanent connection to the Internet. That means you could even use that
old computer with the dialup modem (or none at all) that has been gathering dust in your base-
ment. Why would you want to have WordPress installed on your own computer? How would people
read your blog if it wasn't connected to the Internet? We can think of at least four good reasons to
install WordPress on your system—even if your “real” WordPress blog was hosted somewhere else,
be it WordPress.com or at your own host:
