Wordpress @ Ralf Engel dot Com

So you decided to go from WordPress to WordPress MU (multiuser). Tired of having to maintain several individual blogs, upgrading each one at a time, maintaining all the plugins up to date? I was, too. So I started googling and tried to figure out how WordPress MU can help me AND if I can run WordPress MU on my server without loosing my existing posts and other data.

In this post I will only discuss issues not mentioned in the readme.txt file that came along with WPMU and I will add some information to certain subjects, where I found easier ways to do the job.

If you are hosted on a free server you will not be able to use WordPress MU.
Here is the list of minimum requirements for WordPress MU to work correctly on your server:

1. Backup Backup Backup
2. Apache mod-rewrite on
3. Virtual Host or CNames capability
4. chmod 777 for root directory
5. MySQL database
6. PHP 4 (5) support
7. Importing posts comment data

1. Backup Backup Backup
A dirty installation from WordPress to WordPress MU means that we do have lots of posts and comments in an existing database! Back it up!!!! Go to your MySQL control panel and download the whole thing to your machine. Further do an export within WordPress. Double security!
Keep them in a save place, you will need them to re-integrate your data into WordPress MU later on.

2. Apache
Apache must be configured so that mod_rewrite works. If you were using WordPress before on your server and you used “nice url’s” then you are good to go. If you don’t contact your host and ask them to activate mod-rewrite for you. On my server Hostloco mod-rewrite was active upon “delivery”.

3. Virtual Host or CNames
Your virtual host may not be activated, no big deal, there is a way to get to use WordPress MU on a server without virtual host. What you do need in this case is CNames. Before creating a new blog as a subdomain (e.g.: main domain here is http://ralfengel.com subdomain url to blog is http://wordpress.ralfengel.com) that does only exist virtually, no need to create this subdomain, just add a CName on your web host control panel like this: wordpress.ralfengel.com , then create your new blog in the WPMU control panel. This worked fine for me.

4. Chmod to 777
After uploading all the new WordPress MU files (WITHOUT TOUCHING THE wp-config-sample.php!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), call the index.php file on your domain in your web browser to initialize the installation. You may read a warning message on the bottom to change specific directories to chmod 777. Use FileZilla (Free FTP program) to set these permissions. If the chmod for the root directory is to be changed you may need to contact your host, since (at least in my case) FileZilla didn’t seem to be able to change the values chmod for the root directory.

If everything went right you should now be able to fill out the installation sheet, index.php with the database information needed. After saving your new – empty – blog should load in the window.

5. MySQL Database
Not much to say here, create one, create a user, and you are ready.

6. PHP
Usually the servers today are set to PHP 4 and can be set to PHP 5. My installation of WPMU works fine with PHP 4, but I did find a plugin asking for PHP 5, so I just changed it in the PHP permissions and preferences in the hosts control panel.

7. Importing posts comment data
Since I did a “dirty” installation, I have a backup.xml file on my hands, which contains all the data from my MySQL database. I used the WordPress Export function file. It was huge. 370 posts, 1200 categories, 180 comments and so on made it a pumped up 3,8 MB.
Wordpress MU may – will – can – not import this size of file using the WordPress Import function (I don’t know why, just know that it doesn’t work).
You will need a html editing program to break this file into bits, hehe!!
I used ACE HTML Freeware to do the job. It is somewhat nifty to do, especially because this is a heavy file, takes a while for it to load, and the tab switching is slow, too. You’ll need patience to do it.

Find the very first <item> entry using the – edit – find… – function.
Copy everything from the beginning until just before the <item> and paste it into a new xml file tab.
Copy this:
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
And paste it below the “header” of the file.

If your xml backup file is 4mb of size, then you will have to create 4 files, since I’ve noticed that WPMU will not import anything bigger than some 1.4MB of file size.
Use the right scroll bar button to judge more or less 4 visual divisions of the file. Cut each data segment out including <item> and </item> and paste it in your new header – footer file.
Save it and repeat this till done. My files ranged from between 900KB and 1.2MB, the latter already starting to cause trouble when importing. I had to repeat import 2-3 times for the bigger files, so try and keep the file size low, maybe that helps.

I hope everything will go well for you on this task. I did run into some trouble after having done all the above. See my Upgrade Issues Post for more.

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Tags: WPMU, WPMU bugs, WPMU installation