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.
Update 2010/11/12: I’m still using this great plugin to run the WordPress sites that host with us. Some say that this plugin is redundant now because of the built-in multisite capability of WP since 3.0. However, multisite was built with a social networking idea in mind. Multisite also is a pain to add multiple domains (doesn’t work out of the box). As WP-Hive says on its website, Hive is built for a single administrator to run several sites and on a single WP install, and it’s perfect for that.
Update 2011/06/17: The plugin developer has unfortunately stopped active development on this plugin. It is a shame since I do still use it. There are some instances, for a web developer hosting his/her clients for instance, when multisite isn’t the perfect tool. WP-Hive is. There was a minor scare when the plugin didn’t work with WP 3.1, but that has now been fixed. But as far as being a tool for the long run, it looks like we’ll have to count on multisite.
Tags: multi-site, WordPress, WP-Hive
Just for the record: Virtual Multiblog doesn’t require symlinks for different domains — It uses symlinks if you’re putting installs in different *directories*, e.g. mydomain.com/blog1 and mydomain.com/blog2.
For domain1.com and domain2.com, no symlinks needed.
Yes, the instructions could use some improvement.
Ah, ok, I will rewrite to change that part. So one could just park the domain in the same directory with cpanel, and then have the separate blogs running on one install? That sounds a lot easier!
How would it work if you wanted separate databases ? Wouldn’t the wp-hive method of all sites in one database end up being heavy on the load due to each site adding it’s own separate content ?
Since all tables related to each blog are separate–no blog shares tables with any other blog–I don’t think load issues would be a problem. Now if they did share a table or tables, then table locking issues would probably arise.
I don’t believe it’s possible to have the tables in separate databases. You might get some more information at the WP-Hive forums: http://wp-hive.com/forums/