Help with wordpress mu

Hi guys and gurlz,

I am looking at wordpress mu and find it to be a great tool for installing tons of blogs on one domain. I have questions:


1) I have hostgator hosting and already have a blog in the root domain. I have a couple of add-on domains and was hoping to install wordpress mu on one of those but then I read this at mu.wordpress.com

If you want to use subdomains, it especially need to be in the root. Installing it in a subdirectory, and expecting it to be in the root by the looks of the url isn't feasible. Also, your links will look like either "username.domain.tld/subdir/", or "domain.tld/subdir/username/" as a base. If you use a subdomain as the install point of MU, it would look like "username.sub.domain.tld" or "sub.domain.tld/username/", and even worse with "username.sub.domain.tld/subdir/" or "sub.domain.tld/subdir/username/" if you installed it in a subdirectory as well.

To put it short, domains are cheap. Get another domain if you have to, and make sure you don't add that domain as an "add-on" domain. It needs to have it's own virtual host in apache. Then again, if you've come this far add-on domains shouldn't be an option since you most likely won't be on shared hosting, right?

Click to expand...

So I'm pretty much out of luck and need to get rid of my blog on my root (which is ok because I haven't done anything with it yet.. lol).



2) Also, I should leave the main blog empty and not do anything with it right. Because if that blog gets slapped by google, then so do all of it's subdomains. But I can get a little crazy with the subdomains because they can get individually slapped and won't link to each other or the root.



3) I have looked at trying to find a script to create dozens of blogs for mu and couldn't find much info. I did find this:

h**p://wpmudev.org/project/CSV2BLOG-Bulk-Blog-Site-Creator-WPMU

but I couldn't find anyone successfully implementing it. Any input on that ?

Thanks in advance for helping me with my 3 questions.

AJ.
Thanks for answering.

Ok, so I just thought i would share my progress.
Wordpress mu needs mod rewrite and a whole bunch of other stuff that hostgator already has enabled, so i was happy. The only thing I needed them to turn on was wildcard domains. Their support had this up and running in less than half an hour... so far so good.

So I install mu with no problems, install my favorite theme. Here's a tip. Re-name the current 'default' theme folder to 'default-old' and paste in your theme into the theme folder and rename it 'default'. So now you don't have to adjust anything and every blog you install has your favorite theme as the default theme

I installed all my plug-ins in the main blog and found that they appear to the second blog that I created as a subdomain but they all need to be activated. There is a MU-plugin folder (that makes plugins active but doesnt activate them.. lol) but after researching it, I chose not to use it. Seemed confusing !

The only Pain in the Ass is my Adsense Deluxe plug in where I need to copy and paste my adsense blocks for each blog i will create. Is there any way to automate this ?

So creating polished blogs for me now takes 10 seconds, configuring them takes 10 minutes and now I need to figure a way to get relevant content..

But as a newb, i'm proud to have done this on my own. I got tired of creating blogs manually. I'm only gonna create a couple of dozen blogs and try to keep them decent

My default theme is a mash-up of the following themes: the morning after (vertical menus) and wp-magazine (horizontal menu + layout) and a couple of other bits and pieces.

use lyceum.

Actually I have installed the MU platform already and although I don't use adsense deluxe, I know for a fact that it supports the whydowork adsense plugin. Here is a link if you are interested....

http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/

Also, note that the MU platform doesn't "agree" with a lot of plugins and themes so you need to test each one separately rather than upload and activate a ton of them all at once.

on a separate note, setting a mu platform is perfect for those who want to create affiliate review sites separately and on the fly as well as BANS sites using the PHPBayPro Plug-in.

ajaj said:

I installed all my plug-ins in the main blog and found that they appear to the second blog that I created as a subdomain but they all need to be activated. There is a MU-plugin folder (that makes plugins active but doesnt activate them.. lol) but after researching it, I chose not to use it. Seemed confusing !

The only Pain in the Ass is my Adsense Deluxe plug in where I need to copy and paste my adsense blocks for each blog i will create. Is there any way to automate this ?
.

Click to expand...

if all these blogs are yours and it's one adsense account, why don't you put the adsense into your themes?

mu-plugin folder activates automatically for all blogs (as long as it's a valid mu plugin)

ajaj...good for you. I had looked at MU and found there to be not so great of support (free) with it...however in my research I did find a professor who figured out a way to get a bunch of domains to work from only one install of WP. Great for doing updates and adsense.