Wordpress has finalized a stable multi-user version of its world famous blogging software. For months the home site was was covered in "beta" warnings. While many were using the software it was not advertised much. Earlier if you wanted to have more than one blog in Wordpress you had to have multiple installs. WordpressMU let's you do the same thing with a single install and run them under sub-domains if you desire. This means you can have your blogs about mountain-climbing, nobel prize winners and puppies on under a single PHP application. You can also continue to add blogs and users to those blogs until you get tired.

Scalable with the same features

Wordpress^μ which is a play on the name of the Greek alphabets "mu" (mu = "multi-user" get it?) character is has been design to do the following.

* Everything WordPress does
* Scaling to tens of millions of pageviews per day.
* Unlimited users and blogs.
* Different permissions on different blogs.
* confuse you as to what to call it

Harvard University is using the software to offer free blogging and hosting services to students and faculty.

Now that the software is considered stable the will be lots of new users coming into the community. This will undoubtedly lead to lots of questions concerning how to set up access control, domains, single databases, multiple databse and much more. The forum is going to fill with these questions.

Wordpress^μ is very close to the regular Wordpress core. It uses a wrapper to handle the multi-user and multi-blog capabilities. This means that for the most part all plugins and themes should work on MU also.

There is no word yet about if Yahoo will be offering Wordpress^μ installation and support as part of it's small business hosting package. But there is certainly no reason that they should not. It actually would be a big boost for them to do so. Giving small businesses the option for multiuser is only logical. Reading the FAQ will assure those thinking about large scale deployment that Wordpress is ready to handle just about any thinkable load.

Wordpressmu although stable has many installation problems. Not being able to run under localhost is the largest and one that will stop this CMS from ever being popular. The need for Apache to be configured to follow symlinks is another one that will make life miserable for many. The last requirement, Apache mod_rewrite, is not so much of a problem for running Wordpressmu on a good web host. But you have to remember to turn on mod_rewrite if running the software locally. Using Windows IIS which does not have mod_rewrite is probably not a good idea.

Setting up locally on Windows

Well I guess we should get busy with setting up a demo of Wordpress^μ. Getting Wordpressmu to run locally on windows is a bit tricky. I used Wampserver, Free SMTP Server and Windows 2000 for my local test site.

Wordpressmu will not run on the address http://localhost/ so will have to change the Windows HOST file a bit. I added this to the file:

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain

This file can be found in this path in Windows 2000 and a similar path in Windows XP or Windows 2003.

Windows 2000

c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\

Windows XP or 2003:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\

Since the password is not shown at installation time you have to have an SMTP server running to send out the email with this information. Wampserver does not have mod_rewrite turned on by default so you will have to set this which is pretty easy with Wampserver.

The last thing that is a not a bug. When a blog is created Wordpressmu does not create a folder or copy the files necessary to that folder if it exists. A virtual directory is created in the system and the htaccess path used to find the system blogs. If an actual directory does exist in the install with the same name as the blog then it overrides the system redirection. This means you have to be careful about the directories you may add to Wordpressmu if you modify it. Drupal also uses this mod_rewrite method.

Well that pretty much is it. Just turn your browser to the http://localhost.localdomain/[install directory] and follow the Wordpressmu install instructions. After a little more investigation we will put up a demo of Wordpressmu in the matrix. Until then...

Happy Publishing!

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