Upgrading and maintaining a Wordpress installation has recently become a lot less time-consuming thanks to the automatic upgrade feature for both the main Wordpress installation and the plugins. It is ideal, though, if you’re managing multiple installations for multiple clients, that these clients are running off of one installation of Wordpress. This makes upgrades and maintenance a lot less painful.

Before I knew about WP-Hive, I gave Wordpress MU a try. The installation is quite complicated if working with multiple domains, and then you run into the issue that many plugins and themes are not compatible with MU. MU is great if you’re thinking of running a social network of blogs, but not the ideal solution for running several separate sites on one installation.

There is also Stephen Rider’s Virtual Multiblog which sounded great at the outset, but the instructions proved complicated, involving symlinks for pointing the different domains. Edit: Per comment below by Stephen, symlinks are only required if the multiple blogs are set up in different directories.

Come to the rescue WP-Hive. A simple plugin, simple instructions, simply park your domain through cPanel, install the new Wordpress site using the new domain, and you’re set to go. You have one installation you have to upgrade for everyone. All the plugins you upload for one blog are available to all. Each installation will run it’s own theme, it’s own set of active plugins, and it’s own user and permission set. It gets somewhat complicated when adding XML sitemaps and robots.txt so that each site has it’s own, but following the instructions easily get’s that done.

This site is running on a WP-Hive setup, as well as our client’s site Roca Services and two wedding websites I set up for some friends. We will no doubt be adding many more sites on this setup now that creating and maintaining them is so easy.