Joe Junkin » Wordpress

Updated wordpress

jjunkin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 05:43:30 +0000

Thanks to popurls, I happend to see the exploit warning for wordpress. I just went and updated all my wordpress sites. Thank god for subversion!

Wordpress MU or Standalone?

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:03:03 +0000

We have been evaluating both Wordpress and Wordpress MU (multiuser). Wordpress MU allowsÂ us to setup a domain (or sub domian) and then provide users the ability to create their own blogs instantly. Using Apache wildcard virtualhosts in conjunction with DNS wildcards allows the system to provide users with instant sub-domain hosts of their own which is pretty cool. But is Wordpress MU the answer for a single point install for all blogs that we host? Short answer is not at this time.

This works great for junkin.com.Â There is limited functionality toÂ restrict who can create blogs. In this case users are restricted by email address domain. One can also black list domains.

The problem is that it does not work out of the box for more than one domain. If you want toÂ use domain1.com,Â domain2.com, domain3.com, etc itÂ requires some hacking. I did set it up and it was not a big deal, but I was not super happy with it.Â It requires manually adding data directly to the mysql tables. The added domains do not appear under the main wordpressÂ MU install.

WeÂ decided to forgo the hack and install Wordpress MUÂ where clients will be allowing users to setup many blogs (under one domain name)Â Â and for each user with their own domain name, a standalone Wordpress install.

This obviously adds to our maintenance but seems like a reasonable solution. If Wordpress MU allows out-of-the-box support for multiple domainsÂ we will probably switch to it in the future as a single point solution.

UPDATE:
Wordpress MU does not work properly with the gallery2 plugin. This means that it will not work for many of the blogs I host. There are some hacks around this but it appears messy.

So our plans with Wordpress will be to utilize wordpress mu for free or trial blogs, or for clients who want to offer sitewide wordpress services. There are too many problems with trying to using a single wordpress install for all clients.

Wordpress install and configuration

admin — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:17:23 +0000

Downloading and configuring wordpress on fedora core 6 (FC6) is fairly straightforward. Some questions I had were: what is the best installation and configuration process for setting up multiple blogs, and how easy is it to back up and update each blog?

I found it easier to use the download package from the wordpress website instead of the fedora yum package. I just downloaded the gzip file, unpacked in the target directory, and created a wp-config.php file. I decided to utilizeÂ one mysql database and use prefixes for each different blog. To make life easy I used one database login accross all blogs.

I set up apache virtualhosts for each blog. The web address that is configured in the virtualhost should match the address in Wordpress. This is because wordpress stores the hostname in the database. ServerAlias’s should probably be avoided by using redirects to a single host instead.

ServerName joe.junkin.com ServerAdmin admin@spammenot.com DocumentRoot /home/apacheuser/html/blog/jjunkin ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/wp__error.log CustomLog /var/log/httpd/wp_access.log common DirectoryIndex index.php # would allow .htaccess to be read # AllowOverride FileInfo Options # instead. this disallows .htaccess AllowOverride None # the stuff needed for permalinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

When I tried to switch to date and named based permalinks I received a webserver crash. This was becauseÂ in my VirtualHostÂ AllowOverride was set to None or Options. I needed to add FileInfo to allow Apache to process the local .htaccess. After I just decided to move the necessary code to the VirtualHost section within Apache and changed the AllowOverride back to None (as above).