WordPress MU 2.8 - Beginner's Guide
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WordPress MU 2.8 - Beginner's Guide - Lesley A. Harrison
Table of Contents
WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
What this book covers
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the example code for the book
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. Introducing WordPress MU
What is WordPress MU
Making your own social blog network
What is BuddyPress
What is bbPress
Making and hosting my site
Choosing between VPS, dedicated, and grid hosting
VPS
Dedicated servers
Grid hosting
Server requirements for WordPress MU
Recommended WordPress MU hosts
Building our example site: The SlayerCafe
Planning your site
Summary
2. Installing WordPress MU
Tools you will need
Text editors
FTP clients and other tools
Setting up a local web server
Time for action – getting your server set up
What just happened?
Databases with MySQL
Preparing for WordPress MU—creating a database
Time for action – creating a database for WordPress MU
What just happened?
Time for action – subdomains for WordPress MU
What just happened?
Pop quiz – your local server
Have a go hero – getting more from Apache
Preparing your live server
Time for action – working with cPanel
What just happened?
User blogs with subdomains
Time for action – subdomains under WHM
What just happened?
One last thing—wildcards and Apache
What just happened?
Pop quiz – subdomains
Installing WordPress MU
Time for action – getting WordPress MU up and running
What just happened?
Changing the admin password
Time for action – changing the admin password
Letting people register
Time for action – enabling registrations
What just happened?
Testing your site
Time for action – creating a new user
Have a go hero – doing more with the thing
Summary
3. Customizing the Appearance of Your Site
Picking out a theme
Installing your new theme
Time for action – installing a new theme
What just happened?
Styling the sign-up page
Time for action – editing your theme
What just happened?
Have a go hero – it's time to style
Setting the theme for your users' blogs
Time for action – changing the default blog theme
What just happened?
Customizing your home page
Time for action – making a sign-up button
What just happened?
Featured posts
Time for action – featured posts
What just happened?
Have a go hero – styling the featured post
Showing off your statistics
Time for action – simple stats
What just happened?
Have a go hero – adding extra stats
Pop quiz – doing the thing
Displaying recent posts and comments
Time for action – displaying the most active blogs
What just happened?
Customizing AHP Sitewide Recent Posts plugin
Time for action – tweaking the recent post display options
What just happened?
Pop quiz – doing the thing
Displaying Sitewide recent comments plugin
Time for action – Sitewide recent comments
What just happened?
The plugin display code
Pop quiz – multiuser plugins
Time for action – our improved home page
Other important points
Summary
4. Letting Users Manage Their Blogs
User management basics
Preparing the site for our users
Banned Names
Limited Email Registrations and Banned Email Domains
Media restrictions and upload space
Plugins
Have a go hero – embedded videos
Customization options for your users
Time for action – offering a selection of themes
What just happened?
User editable themes
Time for action – userthemes revisited
What just happened?
User roles and admin panels
Time for action – setting user levels and changing the user's admin panel
What just happened?
Have a go hero – creating new roles
Hiding the dashboard
Time for action – hiding the dashboard
What just happened?
More user options – privacy and using their own domain
Time for action – domain mapping
What just happened?
Have a go hero – server setup for domains
Pop quiz – doing the thing
A few things to consider
Summary
5. Protecting Your Site
Signing up for reCAPTCHA
Stopping spam with reCAPTCHA and Bad Behavior
Time for action – setting up reCAPTCHA
What just happened?
Bad Behavior
Time for action – setting up Bad Behavior
What just happened?
Have a go hero – taking spam prevention to the next level
Making sure the plugins run for your users
Time for action – managing your users' plugins
What just happened?
Blocking bad guys with .htaccess
Time for action – .htaccess settings to stop bad guys
What just happened?
Have a go hero – build your own list
Pop quiz – spam blocking
Other useful plugins
Moderating registrations
Taming your default categories
Regular backups without lifting a finger
Time for action – automatic backups
What just happened?
Have a go hero – other ways to do backups
Summary
6. Increasing Traffic to Your Blog
Improved tagging
Time for action – tagging blog posts
What just happened?
Sitewide tags
Time for action – sitewide tag clouds
What just happened?
Have a go hero – styling the tags page
Using pings
Time for action – pings
What just happened?
Have a go hero – more sites to ping
Trackbacks
Offering RSS feeds
Time for action – offering RSS subscription options
FeedBurner
Time for action – let's burn some feeds
What just happened?
Have a go hero – offering more RSS options
Twitter and social bookmarking
Getting your readers to share posts
Time for action – social bookmarking links
What just happened?
Have a go hero – Digg this
Pop quiz – traffic building
More about traffic building
Summary
7. Sticky Features for your Blog Network
What do people mean by sticky
?
Letting readers and authors communicate
Contact forms
Time for action – setting up contact forms
What just happened?
Improved comments
Time for action – IntenseDebate Comments
What just happened?
Activating IntenseDebate on your users' blogs
Have a go hero – tweaking IntenseDebate
Community features—gravatars
Time for action – gravatars in WordPress MU
What just happened?
Have a go hero – gravatars and themes
Encouraging sign-ups with downloads for members only
Welcoming new visitors
Time for action – creating a welcome message
What just happened?
Related posts for visitors from search engines
Other ways to engage the community
Polls
Sitewide searching
Pop quiz – doing the thing
Summary
8. Adding Forums with bbPress
Installing bbPress
Time for action – installing bbPress
What just happened?
One login for both the forum and the blog
Time for action – user DB integration with WordPress MU
What just happened?
Handling new users
Time for action – blog and forum registrations
What just happened?
Seamless theme integration
Time for action – styling your forum
What just happened?
Have a go hero – more advanced styling and integration
Managing your forum
Time for action – managing your forum
What just happened?
Managing your users
Time for action – setting user permissions
What just happened?
Useful plugins for bbPress
Time for action – installing plugins
What just happened?
Have a go hero – sharing information between forum and blog
Displaying recent posts in your blog
Creating forum topics using blog posts
Pop quiz – doing the thing
Summary
9. Social Networking with BuddyPress
BuddyPress
Setting up BuddyPress
Time for action – installing the BuddyPress suite
What just happened?
BuddyPress plugins explained
Working with Extended Profiles
Private Messaging
Friends list
Groups
The Wire
Activity streams
Blog tracking
Forums
Themes for your BuddyPress network
Time for action – installing new themes
What just happened?
Have a go hero – designing your own theme
Putting BuddyPress content on your front page
Hooking up BuddyPress to other social networks
Time for action – Facebook Connect
What just happened?
Integrating with Twitter
Improving your site's performance
Time for action – speeding up BuddyPress
What just happened?
Pop quiz – so many things BuddyPress can do
The future of BuddyPress
Summary
10. Monetizing Your Site
Ways to monetize your site
Advertising networks as a revenue source
Selling ads directly
Ads in RSS feeds
Donate links
Revenue sharing
Premium memberships
Selling products via your site
Managing ads on WordPress MU
Time for action – ad management with Advertising Manager
What just happened?
Have a go hero - advertising
Revenue sharing
Time for action – revenue sharing
What just happened?
Premium memberships
MemberWing
EasyPaypal
Time for action – premium memberships
What just happened?
Have a go hero – hiding ads from paid members
Other ways to monetize your site—stores
Things to remember when monetizing your site
Summary
11. Site Optimization
Choosing to optimize your site
Speed up your site with caching
Time for action – setting up object cache
What just happened?
The downsides of caching and how to avoid them
More ways to speed up your site—optimizing themes
Spreading the load
Time for action – spreading the load
What just happened?
More theme optimization
Optimizing your database
Time for action – optimizing your site through phpMyAdmin
What just happened?
Have a go hero – automate that optimization!
Troubleshooting slow loading sites
Server side optimizations
Pop quiz – speed up your site
Summary
12. Troubleshooting and Maintaining your Site
Why worry about upgrades
Performing a safe upgrade
Performing a database backup via the command line
Performing a database backup via phpMyAdmin
Time for action – performing the upgrade
What just happened?
Troubleshooting—when upgrades go wrong
Solving database connection issues
Diagnosing unusual error messages
Error Message: Headers already sent...
Troubleshooting—common problems
Time for action – restoring a backup
What just happened?
Protecting your site from hackers
Patch regularly and use good passwords
Limit what your users can do
Avoiding social engineering
Pop quiz
Getting help online
Have a go hero – posting to request support
Summary
Index
WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner's Guide
Lesley A. Harrison
WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: October 2009
Production Reference: 1211009
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847196-54-5
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar (<vinayak.chittar@gmail.com>)
Credits
Author
Lesley A. Harrison
Reviewers
Joseph Arellano
Lee Jordon
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Amey Kanse
Technical Editor
Gaurav Datar
Copy Editor
Sanchari Mukherjee
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Gagandeep Singh
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherji
Project Coordinator
Zainab Bagasrawala
Proofreader
Jade Schuler
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Lesley Harrison has more than ten years of experience working in the world of IT. She has served as a web developer for various local organizations, a systems administrator for a multinational IT outsourcing company, and later a database administrator for a British utility company. Today, Lesley runs her own video gaming site, Myth-Games.com, and works as a freelance web developer. She works with clients all over the world to develop Joomla! and WordPress/WordPress MU web sites.
Lesley has enjoyed seeing the Internet develop from the days of newsgroups and static HTML pages, to the vast and interactive World Wide Web of today.
She worked as a reviewer on Daniel Chapman's Joomla 1.5 Customization book, which was published by Packt Publishing in August 2009.
I would like to thank my husband Mark for his patience while I was writing this book instead of leveling one of my many characters. I would also like to thank Blaenk Denum for his help with the reCAPTCHA plugin, and the Packt Publishing team for their patience and guidance over the past year.
About the Reviewers
Lee Jordon is an avid user of WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, and other useful web applications. She designs interactive customer service portals, enterprise-level web sites, other web-based applications, and writes web content and user guides. Her toolbox includes HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Java Servlets, MySQL, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. She applies over 10 years of experience of designing and writing for the Web to develop interactive, user friendly web sites and writing technical guides to popular web technologies. She is the author of two books with Packt Publishing: Blogger: Beyond the Basics and Project Management with dotProject.
Joseph Arellano holds a B.A. in Communication Arts from the University of the Pacific and a J.D. (law degree) from the University of Southern California. He lives in Northern California and maintains the Joseph’s Reviews book review blogsite (http://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/).
Preface
In today's digital world, it seems that everyone has a web presence—be that a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook, a blog hosted by Blogger or WordPress.com, or their own web site.
General networking and blogging sites are useful for keeping in touch with old friends, but their search tools are less effective if you are trying to find people with similar interests to your own or who work in the same industry.
The multiuser version of WordPress, called WordPress MU, is an ideal solution to this problem. WordPress MU, paired with forum software such as bbPress and the BuddyPress suite of social networking tools, allows you to start your own blog network with social networking features such as friends lists, status updates, and groups. Using these tools, you could start a social network and blogging site for a local social group, a fan club, or your company.
Throughout this book, we will build a blog network called SlayerCafe. This blog network is aimed at Vampire Slayers and their Watchers, as well as other people who are interested in joining the fight against demons of the night. The Slayers and Watchers will be able to share information, swap tips, update each other on their activities, share videos, and discuss demonic goings-on in the site's forums. The Slayers feel they need such a site because they found that public social networking sites such as Facebook weren't suitable for discussing vampires and werewolves. Their serious conversations were invaded by fans of Vampire: The Masquerade and Twilight, which made it too difficult to separate the real vampires from the fictional ones.
This book will explain how to set up WordPress MU and how to seamlessly integrate WordPress MU with bbPress and BuddyPress. You will also learn how to promote your blog network and attract new users, as well as how to keep your site safe, secure, and free from spam.
Running a successful blog network requires a good web server; however, it does not have to be expensive to get started. You will learn about the different hosting options available to you, along with the ways to optimize WordPress MU so that the server load is reduced as much as possible.
If your site is a business venture, then you will be interested in learning how to make money by charging for premium memberships, selling site-related merchandise, or by using advertising. All those options will be discussed.
What this book covers
Chapter 1—Introducing WordPress MU will introduce WordPress MU, bbPress, and BuddyPress and explain the hosting requirements of those sites. You will learn about shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers (known as VPSes), and dedicated servers, and you will get an overview of the benefits and downsides of each of those hosting options. Finally, you will learn how to plan the development of your site so that it has all of the features that you want to offer to your prospective users.
Chapter 2—Installing WordPress MU will discuss setting up a local copy of your site for testing purposes and installing WordPress MU on your web server in subdomain configuration so that users can have WordPress.com style myusername.theblogsite.com
blog addresses.
Chapter 3—Customizing the Appearance of Your Site will cover installing and customizing themes and how to offer a range of theme choices to your users. You will also be introduced to some plug-ins that offer community features so that your blog looks like it is a part of a network, rather than a standalone blog.
Chapter 4—Letting Users Manage Their Blogs will cover more about the multiuser aspects of WordPress MU and setting up some features that allow users to manage their blogs, including allowing them to add and remove plugins and widgets, change their themes, and even have their own domain name point to their blog.
Chapter 5—Protecting Your Site will explore some security options that will make life harder for spammers and hackers, keeping the site clean, safe, and stable for your users. You will learn how to reduce spam, block known bad visitors, and automate backups, so that if the worst happens, you can restore a backup of your site quickly and easily.
Chapter 6—Increasing Traffic to Your Blog Network discusses some simple promotion techniques that will make it easy for you and your site's users to bring in visitors to their blogs. You will learn how to offer RSS feeds that interested visitors can subscribe to, and how to converse
with other bloggers via trackbacks. You will also learn how to use pings to tell blog directories that your blog has been updated and how to promote your blog on Twitter.
Chapter 7—Sticky Features for your Blog Network tells what is meant by a sticky
site and how to make your visitors feel like they are part of the community, encouraging them to return to the site and promote your site to their friends.
Chapter 8—Adding Forums with bbPress introduces the bbPress forum software. You will learn how to install it and how to integrate it seamlessly with WordPress MU. Not only will the two parts of the site look like they fit together, but they will behave like they are part of the same site, too. Your users will need to register for an account once and, when they log in to the site, they will have access to both the blog network and the forums.
Chapter 9—Social Networking with BuddyPress will help us add some social features to our site. BuddyPress offers several features, including friends lists, groups, and The Wire (a feature similar to Facebook's Wall). Along with setting up and optimizing BuddyPress, you will learn how to allow your users to log in to your site with Facebook Connect and how to integrate BuddyPress with Twitter—the popular microblogging
service.
Chapter 10—Monetizing Your Site will show how to monetize your site. We will explore several different options, including advertising, revenue sharing, donations, and subscriptions. Which model (or models) you choose will depend on the kind of community you are running. You will learn about several different revenue models so that you can find the one that suits your site best.
Chapter 11—Site Optimization will explain some ways to