TalkNetwork

I thought I would mention first that I will not go over the WP3 multisite installation in detail, but if you have any questions, leave a comment. I may detail it later on if needed.

Getting WP3 multisite working the way you want it to can be a fairly straightforward process. In fact WP3 is probably the most user-friendly platform I have ever worked with. That’s not to say that you won’t run into your share of frustrations as I have run into a few snags, luckily WP has a large user contributed support community. I’ll lay out everything to get this going, including what not to do as I have learned.

First of all when installing and enabling the network feature of WP3, the functionality that allows you to run multiple blogs, remember to always set your domain as ‘domain.com’ and not ‘www.domain.com’ before enabling the option. This landed me in trouble when working with the sitewide tags which we’ll go into shortly.

Once you have WP3 running and have enabled the network feature, you now have a fully functioning multisite blogging network platform. What I wanted to do was have every post made within the network be aggregated into a central location, such as sharehacks.com. This can give a nice snapshot of what everyone is posting about in the network as a whole and also produces a much more dynamic site.

I searched for a few plugins and dug through the http://premium.wpmudev.org/ archive but didn’t really find one there that I liked. There are a few widgets there that are worth using but I wanted something that would show up as posts, rather then sidebar widgets. WordPress.org maintains a large repository of user contributed plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags seems to be pretty much one of the few plugins that does this well. This will give you the option of either creating a separate blog with all your posts in your network or, you can have it posted to your main blog (generally which is the first blog with ID1). Also, note that this will work with new posts going forward and will not automatically import posts that have already been posted.

There are a couple things to consider at this point. The first thing is that if you did have your multisite setup with the ‘www’ in it, then when creating the blog that houses all the posts will end up with something like ‘tags.www.domain.com’ which will end up giving you problems resolving the site.

To resolve this issue, you will need to edit the wp-config.php file, remove all references to the ‘www’ as well as open up phpmyadmin and remove any references to the ‘www’. Make sure you backup your DB before doing this as you can really mess things up. It sounds more complicated then it really is, its really more tedious than difficult.

The next thing is that, you should consider is installing the plugin manually and uploading the sitewide-tags.php into  the wp-content/mu-plugins folder rather then using the automated install built into WP. This will ensure the plug is running site wide.

If you have any questions, post a comment and I will get back to you. Subscribe and be notified when new articles are posted.