Over the past month I’ve been doing a significant amount of development as I was rolling out the new Facebook application statistics service over at AllFacebook. Everything has been pretty smooth and I think I’ve created a pretty nice platform for building new tools on top of it in the near future. The only problem has been my hosting. Over the past month or two, my blogs have been overloading my server.
It’s really not a ridiculous amount of load for a large hosting environment but my host couldn’t handle it and I was overloading other sites that were sharing my server. After much consideration I’ve decided to go with a dedicated server and one thing which I wanted to include was a new instance of Wordpress MU. What is Wordpress MU? If you’ve registered for Wordpress.com then you’ve already interacted with it.
It’s a simple system for launching a practically limitless network of blogs. The only problem with it is that there is practically no documentation. I spent 6 hours trying to get things configured this afternoon on my new Media Temple server so I could import all my blogs into a single Wordpress MU installation. The other reason I’m trying to make this shift a little more complicated than it should be is because I wanted to install BuddyPress.
I previously wrote about BuddyPress, the custom social network for blogs recently acquired by Automattic. The service looks pretty slick and I figured it would at a minimum be a good platform for handling a large network of users. Unfortunately, BuddyPress only runs on Wordpress MU.
The main point of this whole rambling is that I can’t figure out why on earth the guys at Automattic would require people to use Wordpress MU to get BuddyPress working. I completely understand why they would want the two systems to work together, but individual blogs should be able to install the plugin as well. For most readers, I’m probably losing you but trust me when I say that BuddyPress, the system which was going to turn all blogs into social networks, still has a ways to go before it goes mainstream.
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I was stunned the first time that I decided to analyze the data structure of BuddyPress, twenty and a table set up new! The original installation of WP uses only ten tables, the seventeen WPMU needs, why the hell the BP would need twenty-one for him, resulting in thirty-eight in total (BP + WPMU).
My conclusions:
The BuddyPress has much to evolve before it becomes a reliable system, I think the main thing is back efforts to make it more compatible with your host, WordPress. So there might be greater compatibility between plugins and themes, and also decrease the learning curve for developers already working with WordPress, which in my opinion, could result in a surge in community BuddyPress.
Thanks.
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I really would like to try Buddypress for WP (single user).
I don’t know how long I can wait and are thinking of trying another social network plugin. So, I have 2 questions;
1/ Does anyone know of another plugin similar to Buddypress?
2/ If creating friends on this other platform, is it then later possible to import these friends into Buddypress?
I really appreciate your advice here as I’m not a pro on this.
Cheers -:)
Teijo
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In short, this plug-in bites.
It's a great idea, I wish that a real company would create a facebook/social engine integration. Here's hoping, because this user would gladly pay for a genuine product, not a buggy,
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Is there an alternative?
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I'm looking at using BuddyPress so very eager to hear if you stuck with this and how it worked out.
http://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=185
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Thanks for commenting. I'd love to run my blog network on Wordpress MU for multiple domains. I started looking into and set things up on a new server but things didn't seem to work. I went to look for further documentation and there was none. After spending 6 hours trying to get two domains to work on the same site I decided that it would be better just to have a separate installation for each.
The ultimate goal was to have all the user accounts work across my blog network but unfortunately I'm now considering programming my own system for that. I could have posted on the forum but I don't have time for tracking it, blogging, and programming my other projects at the same time.
If I had a dedicated developer it sounds like Wordpress MU would be a good option. Let me know if you feel differently.
Best regards,
Nick
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http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php
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Thanks for commenting ... I would do that if my user tables were in the same database. Unfortunately they aren't :( Do you know if there is any way to link the two databases to one Wordpress user table?
Best,
Nick
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It's early days for the project and there is no reason why a version for single installations of WordPress can't be released.
It would nice to hear the problems you have had installing WordPress MU, that way they can be considered and addressed. Did you try posting on the WordPress MU forums?
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