What Multisite Can Do For You

Anthony Cole, WordCamp Sydney | 21 July 2012

WordPress Multisite

• Used to be called MU, separate codebase

• Introduced to “core” in 3.0

• Used by everyone from the New York Times to Melbourne University

• We’re talking about it the context of use by an agency

My Background

• First Job: Lead Developer, Agency in Melbourne

• Lots of WordPress.

Then, one day...

• “We have ten sites that need to be upgraded”

• “Why don’t we use WordPress Multisite? I know how to do that”

NOT RLY

But Why?

• Centralised

• Easy to upgrade

• Efficient, Cost effective

Ask yourself...

• What are you trying to do?

• Overcomplication

• Overheads - is it cost effective?

“Take the red pill”

• Web Hosting

• ????

• US vs. Australia

• Who is your target audience?

Hosting

• Australia

• VPS or Shared - I prefer VPS

• United States

• WP Specialists - US based.

• WPEngine or Page.ly - Multisite

• Page.ly: Enterprise plans, WPEngine supports it out of the box

What I did

• Australian Traffic

• I wanted fine grained control over our hosting

Story Time

• One Friday night....

• Server went down at 4AM

• CPU Bug, not anything to do us

• Pretty lights

My Philosophy

• Keep it simple

• Don’t overcomplicate

• Do as little as possible

What happens if you make things complicated

• It might work, but stability is important

A few small things

• Pingdom - DNS/HTTP Checks

• DNS - Externally Managed

• Web Monitoring

• Munin & Monit

Let’s Setup Multisite

• wp-config.php

Setup Continued

Tools → Setup Multisite

Setup Continued

• “Setup Network”

• Subdomains or Subfolders?

• - Subdomains - you’ll need wildcard DNS and to configure Apache and nginx

Basic MS Stuff

• Network Admin UI

• When you’re developing plugins, ms-functions.php is your friend

• mu-plugins - autoloads everything

• http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/17/wordpress-multisite-practical-functions-methods/

Remember...

• Keep it simple

Environments

• Two environments, exact clones

• Development

• Production

Multisite Health

• VCS

• Use Git or SVN, just something

• Nothing is bad

• We used git

Deployment

• Good for complex WordPress setups

• Capistrano

• WP-Stack - https://github.com/markjaquith/WP-Stack

• WordPress-Skeleton - https://github.com/markjaquith/WordPress-Skeleton

Structure is Function

• multisitewp = repo

• two submodules

• ms-plugins - Everything was thrown in

• ms-themes - twentyten and twentyeleven

• themes were submodules of ms-themes

End Result

• A bit messy. Git’s handling of submodules isn’t too good.

• If I could go back and do it again, I’d use braid and build a tool to manage dependencies

Braid

• Ruby gem for dependency management

• Supports git and SVN

• external management

• http://github.com/evilchelu/braid/

Caching

• KEEP IT SIMPLE

What some plugins claim...

LOL

Keep it simple

• wp-super-cache

• APC opcode cache drop in

Uptime

• Pingdom - HTTP and DNS

Backups

• BackupBuddy - basic

• But not ideal

• Ruby script on github that I forked and modified, uses S3 and run on a cron

• link to script

Hold Up

• What if someone hacks my server?

• Better way: Use an external EC2 instance

Plugins

• ALL THE PLUGINS

Awesome Plugins

• New Blog Defaults http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-new-blog-defaults/

• Theme Stats - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-theme-stats/

• WP Debug Bar & Debug Bar Extender

• Domain Mapping - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-

Resources

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

• http://wp.smashingmagazine.com

• http://wpcandy.com

Andrea and Ron Rennick

• Awesome people

• @andrea_r and @wpmuguru

• Networks+ Plugin

• Awesome Resources

• http://wpmututorials.com/

What I do

• So, what do I do now?

• I took the red pill

• Run my own agency

• kosmonaut.com.au

• @ksmnaut

Me

• anthonycole.me

• @anthonycole

• anthony@kosmonaut.com.au

• I love you all

Thanks