The Amenfis Hosted CMS – Powered By WPMU
As I settle down here in Accra, Ghana to build Amenfis, I’m on the look out for various ways to work smarter and get the most bucks for my time. For the first quarter of this brave new year, I’m focusing on critically assessing all processes to weed out inefficiencies, and to document best practices to make life easier for myself, future employees, and present and future clients.
Here is one such inefficiency which is now a thing of the past: I have several client websites under my care, built with WordPress — the popular blogging / online publishing platform.
Problem here is that each of these sites runs its own instance of WordPress, and I end up spending a whole lot of time updating the software and the many plugins they use.
Now this pain is gone, thanks to WordPress MU and a domain mapping plugin. With just one installation (which I’m calling the Amenfis CMS), I can now give the same WordPress experience to all clients.
Just one instance of WordPress and associated set of plugins to manage. Now that’s a sweet relief!
What Is WordPress MU, You Say?
WordPress MU (or WPMU) is the multi-user version of the super-popular blogging / online publishing platform WordPress. Whereas the standard WordPress installation gives you one blog / website, the MU version allows a single installation to power an unlimited number of blogs or websites. This is the software used for popular blogging communities like WordPress.com, EduBlogs.org, and many blogging networks and niche blog hosting communities out there.
The only caveat here is that each of these additional sites has a URL like http://example.amenfis.com (if you do a sub-domain installation on the amenfis.com domain) or something like http://amenfis.com/example/ (if you do a sub-directory installation). Obviously this is not useful thing for a webmaster managing independent websites owned by different clients.
While I’ve known and even used WPMU in the past, this caveat made me always think of WPMU as a community niche blog hosting software, and never as a solution to my problem. That is, until I discovered the idea of “domain mapping” plugins which can map any of the above addresses to the client’s own custom domain.
There are two of these “Domain Mapping” plugins for WPMU out there (actually there are others… but I found some of these were not maintained and didn’t work with the latest version of WordPress MU). The first (and I believe the original) is Doncha’s Domain Mapping plugin. This works great, except the few caveats mention on the developers website, like not working with sub-directory installation.
The second Domain Mapping Plugin (the one I ended up using) is from the fine folks at WPMUDev.org, a paid membership-based site that provides plugins, themes, and support specifically for WPMU users. Membership starts at $79/month, with heavy discounts for longer-term subscriptions.
It’s a simple solution, and it’s working perfectly for (so far). Now what’s left is to upgrade all the existing sites to this new platform… and that’s a simple export-import task. Not a big deal. Thank you Donncha and the WPMUDev team for all the amazing work you do for the WPMU community.
Tags: Amenfis CMS, domain mapping, Donncha, WordPress, WordPress MU, WPMU, WPMUDev
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[...] also completed the migration of all WordPress-powered sites under our direct care to the WPMU instance running on this domain. Life is a whole lot easier [...]
Very good writing, Thanks! Just came across this interesting quote and like to share – “Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.” Wishing you a successful life with contentment and peace!
I have been looking at this too.
Tell me, how do you stop Google from indexing sites with the wrong address? Or does it do it automatically?
If I have 2 domains (domain1.com and domain2.com) running of WordPress MU, will Google only see domain1.com when it goes to it and only see domain2.com when it goes to it?
In addition, if a client is logged in to make changes (domain1.com for example), can they see the theme/plugins domain2.com is using? or even the other registered users?
Hi, I recently started a bloghosting platform (based on wordpress MU) and when I stumbled your blog I paid attention to your theme (looking good) so I was wondering can you tell me is it custom made theme or one of those free ones? thanks in advance! regards, blogiskewl
@blogiskewl: I’ve sent you a mail to the gmail address you used to comment here.
@Anthony: Sorry for the delay in approving and replying to your comment.
There are two main domain mapping plugins out there there that I know of (a free one by Donncha, and a commercial one from WPMUDev), and both of them handle this automatically.
If domian1.com and domain2.com are mapped to different WPMU blogs, then each of them will be indexed independently by Google (since they are different sites with different content). However, if they’re all mapped to the same WPMU blog, then only the primary mapped domain will be seen by Google… all the rest will be permanently (301) re-directed to the this primary mapped domain. Again, this is handled by the domain mapping plugins automatically.
By default, the plugins page is hidden from all users, and you can decide to show it to all users (but no to specific users only). As for themes you can enable one (or more) themes on a blogs-by-blog basis, and all the other themes will be hidden. And individual blog admins can only see the users registered on their own blogs.
Hope that helps.