What Multisite Can Do for you

My presentation at WordCamp Sydney talking about WordPress Multisite

Transcript

1. What Multisite Can Do
   For You
   Anthony Cole, WordCamp Sydney | 21 July 2012
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

2. WordPress Multisite
   • Used to be called MU, separate codebase
   • Introduced to “core” in 3.0
   • Used by everyone from the New York
   Times to Melbourne University
   • We’re talking about it the context of use by
   a web agency
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

3. My Background
   • First Job: Lead Developer, Agency in
   Melbourne
   • Lots of WordPress.
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

4. Then, one day...
   • “We have ten sites that need to be
   upgraded”
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

5. Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

6. Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

7. Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

8. • “Why don’t we use WordPress Multisite? I
   know how to do that”
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

9. NOT RLY
   Sunday, 22 July 12
   

   View Slide

10. But Why?
    • Centralised
    • Easy to upgrade
    • Efficient, Cost effective
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

11. Ask yourself...
    • What are you trying to do?
    • Overcomplication
    • Overheads - is it cost effective?
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

12. “Take the red pill”
    • Web Hosting
    • ????
    • US vs. Australia
    • Who is your target audience?
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

13. Hosting
    • Australia
    • VPS or Shared - I prefer VPS
    • United States
    • WP Specialists - US based.
    • WPEngine or Page.ly - Multisite
    • Page.ly: Enterprise plans, WPEngine supports
    it out of the box
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

14. What I did
    • Australian Traffic
    • I wanted fine grained control over our
    hosting
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

15. Story Time
    • One Friday night....
    • Server went down at 4AM
    • CPU Bug, not anything to do us
    • Pretty lights
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

16. My Philosophy
    • Keep it simple
    • Don’t overcomplicate
    • Do as little as possible
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

17. What happens if you make
    things complicated
    • It might work, but stability is important
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

18. A few small things
    • Pingdom - DNS/HTTP Checks
    • DNS - Externally Managed
    • Web Monitoring
    • Munin & Monit
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

19. Let’s Setup Multisite
    • wp-config.php
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

20. Setup Continued
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

21. Tools → Setup Multisite
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

22. Setup Continued
    • “Setup Network”
    • Subdomains or Subfolders?
    • - Subdomains - you’ll need wildcard DNS
    and to configure Apache and nginx
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

23. Basic MS Stuff
    • Network Admin UI
    • When you’re developing plugins, ms-
    functions.php is your friend
    • mu-plugins - autoloads everything
    • http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/
    2011/11/17/wordpress-multisite-practical-
    functions-methods/
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

24. Remember...
    • Keep it simple
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

25. Environments
    • Two environments, exact clones
    • Development
    • Production
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

26. Multisite Health
    • VCS
    • Use Git or SVN, just something
    • Nothing is bad
    • We used git
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

27. Deployment
    • Good for complex WordPress setups
    • Capistrano
    • WP-Stack - https://github.com/
    markjaquith/WP-Stack
    • WordPress-Skeleton - https://github.com/
    markjaquith/WordPress-Skeleton
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

28. Structure is Function
    • multisitewp = repo
    • two submodules
    • ms-plugins - Everything was thrown in
    • ms-themes - twentyten and twentyeleven
    • themes were submodules of ms-themes
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

29. End Result
    • A bit messy. Git’s handling of submodules
    isn’t too good.
    • If I could go back and do it again, I’d use
    braid and build a tool to manage
    dependencies
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

30. Braid
    • Ruby gem for dependency management
    • Supports git and SVN
    • external management
    • http://github.com/evilchelu/braid/
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

31. Caching
    • KEEP IT SIMPLE
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

32. What some plugins claim...
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

33. LOL
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

34. Keep it simple
    • wp-super-cache
    • APC opcode cache drop in
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

35. Uptime
    • Pingdom - HTTP and DNS
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

36. Backups
    • BackupBuddy - basic
    • But not ideal
    • Ruby script on github that I forked and
    modified, uses S3 and run on a cron
    • https://github.com/anthonycole/simple-
    s3-backup
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

37. Hold Up
    • What if someone hacks my server?
    • Better way: Use an external EC2 instance
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

38. Plugins
    • ALL THE PLUGINS
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

39. Awesome Plugins
    • New Blog Defaults http://wordpress.org/extend/
    plugins/wpmu-new-blog-defaults/
    • Theme Stats - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
    wordpress-mu-theme-stats/
    • WP Debug Bar & Debug Bar Extender - http://
    wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-bar/
    • Domain Mapping - http://wordpress.org/extend/
    plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

40. Resources
    • http://codex.wordpress.org/
    Create_A_Network
    • http://wp.smashingmagazine.com
    • http://wpcandy.com
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

41. Andrea and Ron
    Rennick
    • Awesome people
    • @andrea_r and @wpmuguru
    • Networks+ Plugin
    • Awesome Resources
    • http://wpmututorials.com/
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

42. What I do
    • So, what do I do now?
    • I took the red pill
    • Run my own agency
    • kosmonaut.com.au
    • @ksmnaut
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

43. Me
    • anthonycole.me
    • @anthonycole
    • anthony@kosmonaut.com.au
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide

44. • I love you all
    Thanks
    Sunday, 22 July 12
    

    View Slide