wordpress-mu – Something Odd!

Harvard Weblogs archived by Automattic

Dave Winer just reported that an ancient WordPress MU site that was shutting down has been archived by Automattic. I wasn’t aware that Harvard were using MU back in the day, but if you search, you’ll find posts like this and this one talking about upgrading WordPress MU.

Gives me a nice, fuzzy feeling seeing those long ago posts about using WordPress MU.

If you don’t know, WordPress MU began life as b2++, a fork of b2 (which became WordPress). The fork was started by me to provide blogs for the linux.ie community at blogs.linux.ie. That site is long gone, but you can see an archived copy of the front page here, where I talk about using Smarty for the theming:

We’re using the b2 weblog software, although heavily modified with the following:

Caching and templates are handled by Smarty. You don’t need to know PHP to create your template! The caching should make your page load just as fast when the server is busy as at any other time. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that comment, trackback, and pingback counts might be stale until the page is refreshed. (Yes, I know about Smarty “insert” functions, that’ll come in a later version.)

Donncha O Caoimh, blogs.linux.ie, 2003.

I love that Automattic is now hosting the site, but I’m also glad that archive.org is out there preserving the open web. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an archive.org copy of a page show up in a Google search, however. Have you?

So much useful information is now locked in private Facebook groups, or Discord channels, it’s ridiculous. Here’s a very niche example from only yesterday. I wanted to know what bit depth RAW image files were, and one of the more useful hits was a dpreview thread from 2007!

The MU forums are moving

The MU forums will shortly be closing up shop.

WordPress 3.0 integrated everything that MU always did so it’s better to consolidate the forums too. There’s a MultiSite forum on WordPress.org and any queries about upgrading or problems using WordPress 3.0 should go there.

The old forums aren’t going anywhere but later today or perhaps tomorrow I’ll be making them read-only. You’ll still be able to browse the forum, and Google will still index the wealth of information already there but posting will be disabled.

So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the forum over the years. You helped make WordPress MU great.

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

I’ve just released WordPress Domain Mapping 0.5.2. This plugin allows you to map any domain on to your WordPress 3.0 or WordPress MU website.

New in this release:

WordPress 3.0 support.
Added “domains” page for superadmin to add domains to any blog. The user’s domains page can be disabled by the superadmin too.
Added support for “www.” prefix in front of domains.
Allow dashboard to redirect to mapped or original domain.
Better support for SSL
Translation file added for localization.

For security reasons remote login is now disabled if the dashboard is redirected to the mapped domain. There is a tiny chance of a man-in-the-middle attack during redirection, but it’s just as likely to happen when you’re logging in and sending your username/password to the login form. Call me paranoid.

I would like to thank Ron and Andrea who were a huge help developing and testing this release. Andrea has written a great post on creating a network in WordPress 3.0 plus instructions on upgrading from WordPress MU. Great stuff!

WordPress MU 2.9.2

WordPress MU 2.9.2 has just been released and is mostly a security and bugfix release based on WordPress 2.9.2. Grab it from the download page.

As well as the security fix mentioned above, this version also fixes a few bugs, makes the blog signup process much faster and adds a new “Global Terms” Site Admin page.

The “Global Terms” page is one I should have added years ago. Currently it’s fairly bare, but hopefully in future versions of WordPress it will be expanded. It allows the Site Admin to “fix” the terms (tags and categories) used in MU blogs. These terms are normally synced with the “sitecategories” table but sometimes they go astray. This can happen if you “import” a blog using PHPMyAdmin without going through the WordPress importer, or if a plugin manipulates the terms table directly.
WordPress MU forces the “slug” used by terms to be a sanitized version of the “name”, which isn’t the case in WordPress. This page can optionally rename the terms so they match the slug. It doesn’t do the opposite because that would break public facing URLs on the site. (I must extend a big thank you to Deanna for helping debug that page)

Enjoy!

WordPress MU 2.9.1.1

one dot one dot one dot one dot dot dot…. Yes, last week’s release of WordPress MU wasn’t to be the last one. This is. Really.

WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 fixes #1193 and #1195, two annoying but one liner bugs that crept into the last release.

This is also a security release fixing a bug in the installer that has existed for quite some time. If you can’t update yet, delete the file index-install.php immediately. That file is only used when you install WordPress MU for the first time so it’s not needed afterwards. Don’t ask, “I’m using version x.x.x, do I need to delete this file?” Just do it. Thanks Mad Sprat for reporting the problem.
The index-install.php in 2.9.1.1 is safe, but I’ve added a note at the end of the install recommending the file be removed. The file is not used after installation and it’s always a good idea to clean up unused scripts.

Get WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 on the download page or wait until your Dashboard upgrader finds the new release.
If you’re adventurous, download and replace the following files on your site to upgrade:

Sorry Jeffro! 🙂

WordPress MU 2.9.1

WordPress MU version 2.9.1 has just been released.

This is probably the last release before it is merged into WordPress 3.0 as the merge has already started!

Anyway this release brings the new features and bug fixes of WordPress 2.9 and 2.9.1 into WordPress MU. My favourite new feature has to be the Trash can, but there’s also an image editor, plugins can be bulk updated and video embeds are easier to do.
If you have more than a few dozen blogs, be sure to add the commentmeta table first before upgrade.

Thank you to everyone who has helped make WordPress MU better over the years, either by helping on the forums, writing plugins, contributing code, working on Trac tickets or any of the other hundred and one other things that go into an open source project.

WPMU: Please add commentmeta first

I was going to announce WordPress MU 2.9.1 today but I knew that people would run into trouble with the missing commentmeta table if they didn’t upgrade their blogs immediately.

So, download add-commentmeta.txt, rename it to add-commentmeta.php and copy it into your mu-plugins folder. Login to your site as a Site Admin, visit Site Admin->Upgrade and upgrade all the blogs on your site. Make sure you’re using WordPress MU 2.8.6 as the upgrade script in older versions may not execute the plugin.

The script above will add the commentmeta table to each blog. Give it time because it will take quite a while on large sites. WordPress MU 2.9.1 tomorrow.

WordPress MU 2.9.1 RC

WordPress MU 2.9.1 is almost ready but we need people to test it before the final release. This will be the final release before we start merging into WordPress so I’d love to get as many bugs as possible ironed out. Take a quick look at the tickets in Trac and see if you can fix any!

Check out revision 2044 or to get the latest code get it from trunk instead. If you’re not comfortable with Subversion access, there’s a zip file at the end of each page.

Only try this on a test server of course! The new version creates a new “commentmeta” table on each blog after you upgrade. That could be intensive on large sites. Ron points towards John’s script that adds those tables. I haven’t tried it yet (it’s a job for tomorrow!) but it’s definitely a good idea to create this table on all your blogs before you upgrade. Let me know how it goes.

Sitewide Tags 0.4 for WordPress MU

If you use the Sitewide Tags plugin for WordPress MU you may have missed Ron’s announcement post about the new release.

This version is all Ron’s doing. He merged in features he has worked on over the past year. Check out his blog post for the full list of changes.

Oh yeah, I’m doing mini-merges of WordPress and MU code all the time. Update from trunk (svn link) if you want to try it out, and please report any bugs on trac! I love the new trash feature!

Could this be the last huge WP into MU code merge?

Well, this might be one of the last times I do a huge WordPress MU merge! I’ve just finished merging the code from WordPress 2.9 beta 1 into WordPress MU trunk. No, I didn’t link to the actual merge changeset. That’s 2007 and huge! 🙂

Want to give it a go? Grab the zip file from here and install it on a test server. Do not, under any circumstances install it on your production server! Be aware that I haven’t tested most of the code yet so there may have been errors made during the merge.

We also need to work out a good way of adding the commentmeta table to each blog. If your MU site has more than a few dozen blogs you need to add this table before you upgrade. On WordPress.com, it took quite a long time to add that table to each of the millions of blogs there! It’s probably something that an external plugin should handle. It’ll have to be linked from the MU download page and hopefully talked about enough that nobody tries to upgrade without it. Ideas?

Oh, I’m testing out WordPress 2.9-beta-1 and changed theme here. I’m using a heavily modified version of P2. Love it so far. I’ve managed to hack it to do what I want. Noel did a great job with the theme.