Wordpress

I had a bit of a surprise yesterday, I logged into one of my sponsor filled autoblogs only to find it wasn’t there! My server and WordPress had conspired to perform an amazing disappearing multi site act! Those guys, they make me laugh…with hysterical cries of despair!

Update 25th Aug. 2011: the bug discussed here is still present. I recommend all WordPress Multi Site users install the Proper Network Activation plugin that is available here at the WordPress site.

I noticed a compatibility bug between WordPress 3 Multi Site and Greg’s High Performance SEO so reported the issue to Greg who very quickly took a look at it. It turns out that WordPress Multi Site does not like it when plugins are Network Activated. So, as a warning to all WordPress Multi Site users, do not Network Activate plugins. Not yet, anyway.

To paraphrase Greg’s explanation:

When a plugin is Network Activated, WordPress 3.0 ignores the activation hook that plugins register to run whenever they are first activated. Consequently a plugin’s default options do not get set-up on subdomains when a plugin is Network Activated. It also appears, according Greg, that WordPress does not fully remove plugins that fail to setup across subdomains when Network Activation fails – the database does not get properly cleansed.

I recommend WP 3 MS users do not Network Activate plugins until the WordPress developers fix their oversight.

In the meantime, if, like me, you need to remove a Network Activated plugin that only half installed then you must delve into your WordPress database and remove its settings manually before you re-install it. Affected plugins must then be reactivated on a per site basis. For Greg’s High Performance SEO, this means you must drop the single “ghpseo_settings” entry in “wp_n_options” (it will be repeated in your database as many times as you have sites).

What a mouthful that title is! Just wait ’till you read the next sentence. If, like me, you installed a few WordPress blogs into subdomains before the advent of WordPress 3 with Multi Site features and you now want to consolidate your blogs into a WordPress 3 network with all subdomains managed from one WordPress … Read more

Just a quick post, nothing particularly spectacular but useful nonetheless. If you use the Multi Site functionality of WordPress 3.0 (and I expect this works for WordPress MU too), you might wonder how you can verify your additional blogs with Google, Yahoo and Bing given that each blog has no sub-domain folder to upload the … Read more

WordPress multisite turns a website into a multiblogger machine like wordpress.com where one domain with one WordPress installation can be used to create up to millions of blogs on subdomains or subdirectories. Multisite is hidden part of WordPress that has to be activated manually through a few edits to the site’s wp-config.php file. There is … Read more