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.
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.
My name’s Jen; I’m a cynical, sarcastic, ex-drummer who is fond of dark humor. I've held way too many factory & retail jobs but finally found my calling one Christmas holiday in a dark, musty basement. I am now a CSS & XHTML web standards looney and can be found daily—when I’m not at my Mac—at the local fair-trade coffee shop buying an iced-soy mocha no matter the temperature.
I am also the owner of Pop Stalin Design specializing in CSS & XHTML web design as well as custom WordPress themes.
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:
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.
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;)
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.
Oh really? You can’t make adjustments to themes? Odd, and yes, definitely a concern then.
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.