I have a project coming up that might need a WordPress Multi Site setup. I'm fairly familiar with WordPress, and am confident about design, CSS theme modifications & very basic PHP.

But because I've never done anything with a WPMS setup for a client, I am not 100% certain if I would be able to deliver...

 

How steep is the learning curve when moving from a standard WP site to a multi-site? Is it basically just about adding another 'Super Admin' kind of layer at the top of the hierarchy? Or is it a lot more involved than that? (Server-side knowledge for example?)

Would most of the 'normal' plugins work in a WPMS environment?

 

Would shared hosting be sufficient in the beginning, say for 5-10 sites/subdomains?

Or is shared hosting a definite no-go / only dedicated servers?

 

Thanks a lot!!

It's a few months since I did it so I am very rusty, but I did manage to set up a multi-site installation. I followed a tutorial, which I can't find off the top my head. I have a feeling it involved making a change to the htaccess file and wp-config.php

 

Anyhow, yes you have a super admin who has their own dashboard in addition to having access to the dashboard of your main site. Then your other users can be admins or subscribers on the main site and see the dashboard for that site but not the super admin one. Plus they can see the dashboards of their own subsites.

 

The subsites are just like normal wordpress installations except that they can't install and edit themes and plugins. The themes have to installed by the super admin who can then set them only to be used on the main site, or can network activate them so everyone can use them.

 

We've gone with shared hosting for our network but it has not gone live yet, and I am not at all confident shared hosting will be sufficient. We are talking about more than 10 subsites though.

 

There is a whole load of info at http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/ who do their own plugins (variable quality - some better than others). You can also use normal plugins from the WordPress plugin directory but not all are compatible.

It takes a bit of getting your head around but it's just a case of remembering which dashboard you need to be in when you are logged in as the super admin.

I had to go back to site to remind myself as I haven't looked at it for a while.

 

If you are logged in as super admin you have the usual dashboard for your mainsite at yoursitename.com/wp-admin with your pages and posts etc. Then at yoursitename.com/wp-admin/network you have another dashboard where you install themes and plugins and can choose to network activate them. If you do that they appear in the dashboards of the subsites. This network dashboard lists your users and sites.

Thanks for your explanations, Jane! It does sound fairly straight-forward altogether.