WordPress is awesome, can’t say enough good things about it. But it’s multiuser mode, which formerly was a separate program called WordPress Mu and is now a built-in functionality of WordPress 3.x (with some PHP hacks) called WordPress Multisite, well, it leaves a few things to be desired. Let me just say that it was made for those who want to offer a hosted blogging platform to subscribers, like a mini version of Blogger or WordPress.com where you don’t want users to have full access to everything. It does not work so well if you just want to put several sites/blogs under a central admin.
Here’s some things that are obviously different in multisite mode. You cannot install new plugins or themes from within a sub-site’s dashboard. You must install them from the master admin dashboard and then activate them within the sub-site. You cannot even edit a theme’s stylesheet from within the sub-site unless there’s a plugin installed that adds that capability. So you must edit that theme from the master dashboard or upload your edited stylesheet into the master blog’s themes directory on the host. So if you use that theme in more than one site, the stylesheet changes will apply to all that use that theme.
I imported www.melodielaylor.com and www.melodieshouse.com (my personal blog) and a third site I haven’t take live yet into a multisite install of WordPress. Another issue I encountered is that the folder structure of the sub-sites is not the same as that of standalone WordPress installs, therefore I lost pictures (or the links to them) in my posts. This is enough to make me consider creating new accounts on my host and copying them back to standalone WordPress installs, especially my personal blog as there’s a lot more content there and I really don’t want to re-upload pictures and fix the links for every post where I added pictures. Another thing I noticed is that even though I configured both sites to use their own domain names, for Melodie’s House only the home page stays on melodielaylor.com but all the posts and the pages resolve to the default subdomain of the master site (melodieshouse.jamahost.com). Every page and post in this site resolves properly to melodielaylor.com(/whatever). I thought I set both sites up the same, but maybe I missed something. It’s aggravating to me, but I’ll figure it out.
And finally, though most themes and plugins that are known to work with WordPress 3.x work in multisite mode as intended, not all of them do. This is especially true of plugins.
In conclusion, the main reason I imported my standalone sites into WordPress Multisite was so that I could learn how to implement and configure a multisite installation. I may keep my sites in there just to keep familiar with the differences, if I can get my personal blog back to where it was with pictures and links before I moved it without too much hassle. We shall see.
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