This new year — 2010 — is the year my little baby Amenfis™ transitions from a one-man freelance operation to a full-fledged technology consulting company. How exciting!

And since the beginning of the year, we’ve been reviewing our processes and working our buts off to serve our customers even better than we’ve done in the past.

Here are some of the things that have kept us busy in the last couple of weeks:

The biggest change here is that we’ve switched servers and migrated all hosted websites to a new cloud-hosting facility. This new facility is from the same company that we’ve come to love and respect, but moving away from their dedicated boxes to this “cloud” infrastructure allows us to easily scale up to meet any demand. And with their new usage-based billing, we’re saving significantly on our hosting bills… and will surely pass on these savings to our customers.

We’ve 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 now.

Finally, continuing our re-branding work, we’ve changed our name server domain from ghanaplex.net to amenfis.com.

These changes, to our own surprise, went very smoothly. There are still some minor issues we’re addressing (mainly with email delivery on a few accounts), and we’ll . In the meantime, if you encounter any surprises, kindly contact us on telephone +233-27-5785582 or email support at this domain (ie amenfis.com).

Thank you all for your patience and understanding during this transition.

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.