It is kind of weird to write this, but as of today the bava is no longer powered by WordPress Multi-User. I have upgraded this site to WP 3.0 Beta 2. For almost three years now this site has been running on a multi-site WPMu setup that contained not only this blog, but jimgroom.net, wpmued.org (now a deprecated name space:( ), and several other personal sites. The bava WPMu install became my test bed for UMW Blogs over the last three years, and to see it return back to a straight WordPress site (though it’s not really that anymore with 3.0) is kinda bizarre.
I’ve been working with WPMu for more than four years, and I’ve literally written hundreds of posts on this blog about my work at hacking it. And I’ll be the first to admit I am the worst of hacks—don’t know a lick of code—but that being the case, WPMu made me. I can daydream that my b-movie posts or my tour-de-force toy blogging put me on the map, but it was my sophomoric work with WPMu and UMW Blogs that gave me a reason to blog just about everyday for almost four years. It was a good run, and I couldn’t have done it without Donncha—so thank you kindly. And while I know it’s time to move on, I certainly mourn a chapter of this blog that is effectively closing. I’ll still be blogging through the transition of UMW Blogs from WPMu 2.9.2 to WP 3.0, and there is much to talk about and figure out there yet, but with this post a piece of the bava is dying. But, that said, I wouldn’t trade it for the world because, as William Faulkner says, “Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” Good bye Mu, I’ll miss you!
On a more prosaic note, the upgrade from WPMu 2.9.2 to WP 3.0 Beta 2 went extremely smoothly following this tutorial (just be careful of the wording in Step 1, what he means to say is replace all files and folders except wp-content, leave that be). Some initial observations:
- Userthemes is further borked after the upgrade, but it looks like WP 3.0 Beta 2 has Theme editing built-in across sites. I may be wrong, but when I deleted Usertheme, an edit button showed up on various blogs. This could be awesome, but it also means I have to find a way to un-usertheme a lot of blog that were userthemed in UMW Blogs. This will take some looking into.
- The various mapped WPMu sites I had on by own WPMu install worked without issue. jimgroom.net is a full blown WPMu site within a site (or the correct terminology now would be network within a network?–not sure.) Thos worked fine, as did some straightforward mapped domains, which is nice. But, I am still using the mu-plugins folder with various plugins that control these functions. Need to experiment with how much they bork when I start deleting MU plugins, we’ll see.
- Need to test the Sitewide Tag Pages Plugin that Donncha created, that has been key to the syndication framework on UMW Blogs, but I think it will be managed for too much longer even if it does still work. Need to find out of some global posts/tags/terms are being used across sites. We’ll see.
- On that note, need to see what FeedWordPress is all about in 3.0, that will prove crucial as well.
- Need to figure out the whole Child Theme thing, as well as test some out a whole series of plugins while cleaning out my mu-plugins folder.
As you can see my list of things is long, and there is much work ahead and I plan on blogging it all. But as of now a big step 1 is done [sniff].
