Anthony Cole at WordCamp Sydney 2012 takes us through using Multisite in a commercial scenario

1. What Multisite Can Do
For You
Anthony Cole, WordCamp Sydney | 21 July 2012

2. 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

3. My Background
• First Job: Lead Developer, Agency in
Melbourne
• Lots of WordPress.

4. Then, one day...
• “We have ten sites that need to be
upgraded”

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

9. NOT RLY

10. But Why?
• Centralised
• Easy to upgrade
• Efficient, Cost effective

11. Ask yourself...
• What are you trying to do?
• Overcomplication
• Overheads - is it cost effective?

12. “Take the red pill”
• Web Hosting
• ????
• US vs. Australia
• Who is your target audience?

13. 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

14. What I did
• Australian Traffic
• I wanted fine grained control over our
hosting

15. Story Time
• One Friday night....
• Server went down at 4AM
• CPU Bug, not anything to do us
• Pretty lights

16. My Philosophy
• Keep it simple
• Don’t overcomplicate
• Do as little as possible

17. What happens if you make
things complicated
• It might work, but stability is important

18. A few small things
• Pingdom - DNS/HTTP Checks
• DNS - Externally Managed
• Web Monitoring
• Munin & Monit

19. Let’s Setup Multisite
• wp-config.php

20. Setup Continued

21. Tools → Setup Multisite

22. Setup Continued
• “Setup Network”
• Subdomains or Subfolders?
• - Subdomains - you’ll need wildcard DNS
and to configure Apache and nginx

23. 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/

24. Remember...
• Keep it simple

25. Environments
• Two environments, exact clones
• Development
• Production

26. Multisite Health
• VCS
• Use Git or SVN, just something
• Nothing is bad
• We used git

27. Deployment
• Good for complex WordPress setups
• Capistrano
• WP-Stack - https://github.com/
markjaquith/WP-Stack
• WordPress-Skeleton - https://github.com/
markjaquith/WordPress-Skeleton

28. Structure is Function
• multisitewp = repo
• two submodules
• ms-plugins - Everything was thrown in
• ms-themes - twentyten and twentyeleven
• themes were submodules of ms-themes

29. 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

30. Braid
• Ruby gem for dependency management
• Supports git and SVN
• external management
• http://github.com/evilchelu/braid/

31. Caching
• KEEP IT SIMPLE

32. What some plugins claim...

33. LOL

34. Keep it simple
• wp-super-cache
• APC opcode cache drop in

35. Uptime
• Pingdom - HTTP and DNS

36. 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

37. Hold Up
• What if someone hacks my server?
• Better way: Use an external EC2 instance

38. Plugins
• ALL THE PLUGINS

39. 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-

40. Resources
• http://codex.wordpress.org/
Create_A_Network
• http://wp.smashingmagazine.com
• http://wpcandy.com

41. Andrea and Ron
Rennick
• Awesome people
• @andrea_r and @wpmuguru
• Networks+ Plugin
• Awesome Resources
• http://wpmututorials.com/

42. What I do
• So, what do I do now?
• I took the red pill
• Run my own agency
• kosmonaut.com.au
• @ksmnaut

43. Me
• anthonycole.me
• @anthonycole
• anthony@kosmonaut.com.au

44. Thanks
• I love you all