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7 Comments | Jan 16 | WordPress

Using WordPress MU as a Development Environment

A mailing list I subscribe to, Women Designer’s Group, one of the women briefly spoke about using WordPress MU for client development. The MU stands for ‘Multi-User’ and so it struck me as a brilliant idea. I’m thinking about implementing it in the near future since I do so much WordPress theme development work. Hell, it’s what Wordpress.com is powered with.

WordPress MU Features

  • Everything WordPress does
  • Scaling to tens of millions of pageviews per day.
  • Unlimited users and blogs.
  • Different permissions on different blogs.

What do you think? Pros, cons; is this a viable solution? I’m not super familiar with the admin side of MU, although I do know that it’s basically WordPress with MU wrapped around it for administration.

 

7 People Have Bloviated

  1. Lorissa | Jan 17

    You know, I was just wondering this the other day and it seems it may be the ideal option for a new project. I think it ‘d be worth trying at least. Some have argued that for smaller projects WP MU may be overkill, and perhaps the project I have in mind is too small for something like this.

    Some cons to think about as per this article at devlounge:
    1. The MU community is still pretty small and apparently the documentation isn’t extensive so it may be more difficult to get started.
    2. You’ll need to do some editing to core files to allow certain tags. From Thord on devlounge:

    “Per default, you can’t even publish a YouTube video, since some of the tags the embed code uses get stripped away.”

    I think it all comes down to whether WordPress MU fits the bill for the project. It’s obviously a great system, especially if you want your own blogging network, but it may be too much for other projects.

  2. Lorissa | Jan 17

    So… I haven’t had any coffee today which may explain my tangent about WordPress MU and projects, when your question was about using it as a development environment. Ahem. Excuse me.

    I think it’s actually a brilliant idea to setup for development. As you said, you do a lot of WP template work and this would make it that much easier.

    I will now get some coffee and think before I comment;)

  3. Jen | Jan 17

    I myself haven’t had my coffee yet so hopefully this comment will make sense. I personally do a lot of small tweaks in the dashboard of WordPress once I develop it outside of WP, there is no function within MU to make adjustments to themes. That in itself is an issue for me. I’ll have to keep thinking on it, ’cause I don’t think, in the long run, it’s a good environment for development.

  4. Lorissa | Jan 17

    Oh really? You can’t make adjustments to themes? Odd, and yes, definitely a concern then.

  5. Jen | Jan 17

    Yeah, you have to do it outside of MU and then in the admin, you assign certain themes to certain blogs. Not the solution I was hoping for.

  6. rabidGadfly | May 6

    I looked into WordPress MU but judging from the posts I read you have to be run Apache. Documentation also seems pretty minimal at this point so I decided to wait a while in the hope that it will mature a bit over the next year or so.

  7. Glen Z. | Nov 7

    Currently you can just use a stand-alone install of Wordpress on your development environment and when you are done skinning and applying themes you can just copy the theme to the live environment and then select the blog it belongs to in MU. If you want to use MU for your development environment then it can work the same way. If your looking to do lots of custom work and tweaking then it may not be for you.