I have a number of blogs, in fact way too many than I care to admit. It had become a nightmare for me to keep wordpress plugins and themes up to date. Last month I made the decision to move them all to WordPress MU and downgrade my hosting from a dedicated server hosting (Superb Hosting) to virtual server hosting (VPS.net Hosting).
It took me a few weeks to migrate and I ended up abandoning a third of my blogs along the way, which was a good thing as I had way to many blogs to start with. There were a lot of lessons learned along the way, here are some quick gotchas and tips to help you plan a migration to WordPress MU, be it via outsourcing or on your own.
- The permalink structure of WordPress MU forces /blog/ as part of the URL for all of your blog posts. You can get around this but it is not recommended as this is hard coded into WPMU.
- Some WordPress themes do not work well with WordPress MU without considerable non-newbie-friendly customization, notably Thesis and Headway. Woothemes and Flexsqueeze work best with WPMU.
- Although WPMU is part of WordPress and enabled by some minor setting changes, you still need to install a special network plugin if you want to host multiple domains with WordPress MU.
- Migration of content is relatively painless as WordPress provides an import/export function. Also, a number of plugins and themes also allow you to export and import their settings and configuration to assist with your migration.
- Some plugins just do not work with WordPress MU at all. I spent a lot of time discovering the ones that work the best.
I have another blog called Setup Tips (also hosted on the same WPMU instance) where I will document the exact steps I took to perform this migration as the technical details are not really relevant to the topics of Excited By Life.
If anyone is planning on doing a migration of all their blogs to WordPress MU let me know in the comments below if you have any problems or issues, I am happy to help as best I can.
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About Danny Sheehan
Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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