ERIC SHEFFERMAN <DOT> COM

WordPress 3.0 Multisites is the indirect solution to so many security and maintenance problems.

I love the ability to rapidly create a beautiful website by installing WordPress and adding a theme. Create a few pages and WordPress handles all the navigation links. Want a contact page? Just add a plugin and you’ve got a contact for with CAPTCHA or whatever other protection you want.

However, creating a WordPress site — even a static one — requires regular maintenance: logging in and running upgrades to WordPress and to the plugins. If you don’t, eventually you’ll be bitten by some security hole. And when that happens — ick!

So what happens is:

You have one blog running WordPress. You log in regularly and maintain it. OK.

You add another site. Pretty! And another. And suddenly you’ve got THREE sites to log into and maintain.

And you build a quick blog site for a friend who doesn’t know computers. And a static site on a topic you have a few things you want to write about. And suddenly running maintenance and plugin upgrades becomes a full-time job.

And you want to do a few extra security upgrades? Lock down the log in page or make it stop giving out hints? Or any other brilliant touch for extra security? Suddenly, you have to do it FOR EVERY site you have running WordPress (especially those sites that are static which you would otherwise not have even looked at for another few months or years).

But now… WordPress 3.0 with MultiSites (Multi-sites? Multi sites? I have to check the spelling) TADA!

You can have ONE WordPress install that you maintain and upgrade and do all the wonderful security tricks you want and use that ONE install to run ALL your sites. Suddenly maintenance drops to JUST ONE central WordPress install to maintain. Having 50 domains on a variety of topics is a breeze!

Ah… but to get it to work. That I haven’t figured out yet. But I’m working on it.

Looking at my site, I realized that some of my code snippets are a little wide for my theme and may be being cut off in some browsers. On top of that, WordPress seems to like to mangle code. In the Edit Post page, there is a specific code button when you use the HTML editor, but the button doesn’t appear on the Visual editing screen.

My solution is to put code into a Popup window that will allow the user to view it more clearly and in a window wide enough for even the widest lines of code. In addition, this will allow me to make a photo gallery pop up and probably all sorts of other uses I’ll eventually invent. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is just a quick little addition to the footer of the blog to show how many database queries it took to build the web page and how much time it took. Read the rest of this entry »