The Future of Multisite

The original use case of the Multisite feature in WordPress (formerly WPMU) was wordpress.com, where users can create and manage their own blogs, independent from all the other blogs in the network.

Outside of wordpress.com, this is the more common story: someone sets up a multisite installation and needs to create and manage several sites, usually with similar appearance and functionality, but different enough to warrant distinct child themes.

In this later scenario is where the administration interface falls short. This is what needs to be streamlined in order to make Multisite as user-friendly as all the rest of WordPress.

I’ve found myself writing several plugins for this use case already:

• Hyper Admins
• User Management Tools
• Proper Network Activation
• My Sites Widget

Update: Ipstenu posted some common scenarios when multisite should not be used.

Proper Network Activation: Version 1.0

This plugin came as a solution to the recently discovered problems with network activation on MultiSite installs.

The plugin does two things at the moment:

• when doing a network de/activation, it triggers the de/activation hook on all sites in the network
• when creating a new site, it triggers the activation hook for all active network plugins on that site

Network Activation: Beware

When running WordPress MultiSite, you have a very handy feature called network activation. It allows you to activate a plugin for the entire network of sites. The trouble is that it only does half the job.

Some plugins have an install procedure that is meant to be run only on activation. However, when you do a network activation, that install procedure is only run for the current site. So, you end up with plugins not working properly on all the other sites.

What’s worse, WordPress doesn’t give any hints about the cause of the problem. I’ve opened a ticket to see how we can remedy this.

It seems MultiSite still has a few gotchas that need to be addressed before it can be recommended to casual users.