WordPress MultisiteWhy it was the right choice for us

WordPress Meetup St Petersburg January 2017

Doug Lawrencedouglawrence.comCopy with attribution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Stories like ‘The Hobbit’ often fit into a style calledThe Hero’s Journey

Our journey

• Though not heroic our use of WordPress Multisite was a journey too

• In that journey we needed the help of friends and overcame obstacles

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Before we started our journey

• We used Dreamweaver and Drupal

• Dreamweaver– Didn’t have the functionality we needed

– Upgrades weren’t cheap

– Dreamweaver forums seemed to have strict rules that discouraged us from seeking help

• Drupal

– Seemed complicated

– Wasn’t supported very well by our hosting company

– We also failed to implement updates until eventually the site was unstable

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wordpress.com

• We started using wordpress.com as a blog platform

• Entry costs were very low

• Community support was great

• We moved to .org self-hosted for more flexibility

• We started attending the Manchester WordPress Meetup led by WordPress co-founder Mike Little (https://mikelittle.org/)

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Copyright © Amicus TransTec Limited 2007-2013

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The beginning

• Started attending the Manchester WordPress User Croup – https://mwug.uk/

• Moved to ISP hosted WordPress

• Attended Mike Little’s WordPress training courses https://mikelittle.org/wordpress-training/

• Initially used Theme forest and Udesign

• Attended WordCamp UK where Mike Little and Peter Westwood https://profiles.wordpress.org/westi/ helped me move to Multisite

• After problems with Arabic locale Mike Little wrote a ‘Must Use’ Multisite locale plugin

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The middle

• We moved to Genesis and StudioPress buying all the themes (http://my.studiopress.com/pro-plus/)

• Soon discovered many plugins, developers, and even ISPs saw Multisite as complicated and often didn’t support it

• Attended more WordCamps, spoke at a few, swapped t-shirts and swag from WordPress events

• Moved to unmanaged VPS at the request of our hosting provider

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Where we are now

• We selected http://www.verytwisty.com/ as a developer – International and social media navigation

– Language settings such as hreflang

– Many implementations such custom post types

– Presented together at WordCamp Birmingham UK https://2015.birminghamuk.wordcamp.org/http://www.slideshare.net/DougLawrence/mind-your-language-doug-lawrence-belinda-mustoe-20150221

• Moved to https://pressjitsu.com/ after existing hosting company couldn’t solve our Multisite problems– As a WordPress only hoster Pressjitsu solved all our problems the

day we transferred to them. They took away all our worries and because of their amazing support continue to do so

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Mistakes

• We have focused on functionality and therefore have some unfinished content

• We need to review our content and draw a line between ‘under construction’ and completed content

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The future

• Woocommerce Sensei for online courses

• Detailed development plan

• More content, especially blog posts

• Image library

• More integration with other technologies we use

• Events plugin

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Other WordPress presentations

• http://www.slideshare.net/DougLawrence/wordpress-multisite-20150815 WC Russia 2015

• http://www.slideshare.net/DougLawrence/mind-your-language-doug-lawrence-belinda-mustoe-20150221 WC Birmingham 2015

• http://www.slideshare.net/DougLawrence/doug-lawrence-wpukgoingglobalwithwordpress20130708-24417260 WC UK 2013

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What should you do?

Contribute to the WordPress community

Use Multisite – or at least don’t be afraid of it!

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Спасибо!

douglawrence.com

douglaslawrence.ru

https://vk.com/douglawrence

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