Hello to anyone that uses WP MU. After a couple of weeks struggling with Drupal (test site works great but the live site is borken) I am going to try and give WP a chance to fill my needs. Just a few questions as to the usabilty of WP MU?

The site will provide a community for those invovled in strength training in the UK and a shop. I moved to Drupal for Ubercart and the various addons for creating a social networking site. They work great on my test site, but for the life of me I can't get the live site to work.

I am happy to keep the shop simple as initially products will be limited. For the social networking aspect I just had a look at WP MU. I persume that users can have specific permissions set as to where they can start a blog, and that I can have a central main site that people have to come to first before they go to others blogs.

So basically I have the main site with recently updated blogs in a side widget - and blogs searchable by category. Would it be possible with that to have a widget (say latest shop products) displayed on every blog?

Thanks in advance,

John

I'm using the Buddypress plugin on top of WPMU because it adds a nice nav bar at the top of the main and all user blog pages, and it comes bundled with forums and other group-friendly stuff.

The main problem with MU/Buddypress right now is a dearth of good themes for the "home" blog. I'm sure that will change. I'm hoping Themeframe will allow me to create my own theme with all of the functionality needed for an MU installation.

You can add widgets just like you can with normal WP. I don't see why you couldn't have a widget for e-commerce, but I haven't explored that myself yet. If you go to wordpress.org and search for MU, you'll find a lot of information.

Will give it a shot. Running a bit behind schedule now. Site was meant to go live at the start of the year.

Fingers crossed this is going to work.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

John

That's WP MU installed and running. Had to get my host to enable wildcard dns settings, all working smoothly. Just need to try and get my head around it all now. Spent the past week weeks straining over Drupal.

Lets see what Buddy Press does.

Lack of available themes is the drawback...some of the coders over at BP are working hard to create a great community software. It has a ton of potential.

I'm at www.erhom.com

I'm tired of waiting for real theme gurus to create something better than what I've seen so far. At some point when I have time, i'm going to try my hand at making my own Buddypress-friendly theme for the main blog of my WPMU site. I think it won't be too hard, using the Buddymatic theme and some Thematic child themes as the templates. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/buddymatic

Famous last words, right? I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, happy holidays, all!

I'll keep my eye out for ya! There a few things I would love to see changed on the theme I'm using now, I just don't have the experiance to pull it off. I know just enough to be dangerous. (and screw something up big time)...