Lately I’ve been experimenting more and more with WordPress Multisite, mostly for the purpose of creating test sites for my plugins.
Good information about WordPress Multisite can be hard to come by, but I found the best tutorials, plugins and themes over at WPMUdev.
Here are some of my favourite Multisite plugins that I’ve found there:
Anti-Splog
Anti-splog is an absolute must-use plugin for WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress, saving you days of work by blocking and then intelligently killing spam blogs (splogs). Built originally for Edublogs, it uses years of experience and the data from thousands of other Multisite networks to block and then kill the spam that’s driving you mad.
How It Works – When a user completes the signup for a blog (email activated) or publishes a blog post it will send all kinds of blog and signup info to the WPMU server where they will rate it based on their secret ever-adjusting logic. The API will then return a splog Certainty number (0%-100%) to your server. If that number is greater than the sensitivity preference you set in the plugin settings (80% default) then the blog gets auto-spammed. Since the blog was actually created, it will still show up in the site admin (as spammed) so you can unspam later if there was a mistake (and our service will learn from that). Brilliant eh?
Pro Sites
Pro Sites lets you create your own profitable blog or site hosting network, like Edublogs.org or WordPress.com. Offer your users the chance to upgrade their sites and access features like premium themes, plugins, extra storage, domain mapping or removing advertising.
The idea is you offer features that make them want to sign up for a paid site rather than use a free site. We refer to the paid blog as a ‘pro site’ and the free blog as a ‘non-pro site’ however you can change it’s name on the Settings page in Network Admin » Pro Sites » Settings.
Pro Sites is per site, not per user. When they sign up for a single Pro subscription, the dashboard they are logged into when they subscribe is the site that is upgraded, and Pro features are only applied to that site, so if they are a member of another site they will not see Pro features on that site.
New Blog Templates
New Blog Templates lets you use existing sites to create a catalog of templates that dramatically improves site creation on your WordPress Multisite network for both you and your users.
Perfect for network owners to instantly create new sites populated with content, users and plugins, it’s also a snap to allow new site owners to choose a template for their new site.
With New Blog Templates, every new site can inherit the posts, pages, images, attachments, categories, taxonomies, menus, users, site settings, even active plugins for any site on a multisite network.
Invaluable if you want all your sites to use the same structure, plugins and contain a standard set of pages or posts. You can even lock inherited content from being edited by anyone other than a network admin, allowing for all sites to have an “about this network” page, for example.
Some snippets I’ve found useful:
Remove Option to Just Create User during Signup
https://gist.github.com/rohmann/6334639
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