Choosing between WordPress and WordPress MU
Having just started two interesting – and hopefully money-making – projects using the WordPress platform, I thought I would relate my thoughts on why I did not choose the WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) option. Last December 2008 one of my client’s WPMU sites got hacked. I had spent considerable time setting it up, including many individual blogs off it. I reinstalled time and time again, contacted the hosting company, etc. There wasn’t anything that I didn’t do to try to get it back up and running permanently, including practically re-writing everything. Each time I proudly got the site back on its feet, a couple of days later it would crash again. I could see the hackers’ code, knew which files were infected, kept running antivirus checks, etc. but all to no avail. I did learn a lot about WPMU in this period; also a lot about hacking! I’ve found various ways now to safeguard WordPress blogs, and next week I shall see if my client’s WordPress MU site is still clean before I actually go ahead and work on it again, particularly since it will become a membership site. It is unfortunate though that if you have to use high levels of security on your website – be it blog type or standard – that working on it takes double as long since you have to “disarm” the security temporarily to make advanced changes. Still, it’s all worth it.
Now I should really have used WordPress MU for my Helloo ! site, but I was certain that at some stage I would run into trouble, and would be so so upset if I had to start from scratch, or even just make small repairs. It’s all so time-consuming. The post before this one here will tell you that Helloo ! has a little bit of everything on it, which is the intention. So really using the WPMU platform should have been the obvious choice. I also wanted to put my photographs’ galleries back on show, with the ambition of growing it intensely since I have so many photos and pictures stored away on my hard drives. But I didn’t want the photos to be in the same place as “the portal for background information“.
Helloo ! is hosted with JustHost.com. (Yes, you can see my affiliate link, which on this weblog I am not masking). I did a lot of research to find a hosting company who could offer more than just one database and lots of space at a decent price, and with good support (not that I’ve had to use them.. yet). JustHost.com has a lot of good reviews, and became my solution. Instead of using WordPress MU for my multi-blogs….. I installed TWO lots of WordPress in separate directories and separate databases! And it all works magnificently – so far no clashes. 
I know many of you are going to say that this method is going to take up lots of space and bandwith, but it works very efficiently, and I save time with backing up.
I did have a small glitch though, to do with Feedburner. I have just spent over an hour in Google’s Feedburner site configuring all my blogs’ feeds. Sometimes it all worked fine, as with this site, WordPress Education, and other times I found the settings wouldn’t change, particularly for Comments Feed, and then one Channel just refused to be added. After a short break (making a cup of coffee) I went back into Feedburner and all was fine; perhaps just a server temporary problem. However, it did make me read practically everything on their site (which almost led me to having to take some paracetamol afterwards!) – they don’t make it easy, i.e. user-friendly. This Feedburner glitch experience has led me to wanting to write a post in Helloo ! about what Feedburner feeds can do in friendly “just tell me how to do it” terms. So stay tuned…
