A lot of people want to be able to run as many sites as they want with just one installation of WordPress. Before WordPress version 3.0, you had to use WordPress MU (Multi User) which was not in line with the actual WordPress codes. So basically you would be able to have any number of sites running on WordPress MU but you may miss out on some functionalities. This was not such a big deal for many people who liked the idea of running many websites/blogs from just 1 installation but now with the release of WordPress 3.0, this has been made even more simple.
The greatest benefit of being able to have a many sites on one single wordpress installation is maintenance. You just need to update your files in one place rather than update it in several places as soon as a new version comes out. It is advisable to upgrade to the latest stable version of WordPress as soon as it’s made available. So this is a big time saver in terms of updating but as well as launching new sites.
When I first tried WordPress MU, I was very keen to get my sites running but I eventually found out that to be able to run different domains on WordPress MU, you need to get a wildcard mapping for subdomains. Now because WordPress MU has been merged into WordPress 3.0, you have the same problem. I remember how difficult it was to set up and I eventually gave up.
So if you have your main blog at www.example.com and want www.myotherdomain.com to be hosted on WordPress 3.0, then you’ll have to do a wildcard mapping. Now if you’ve got a dedicated server, you can get it done quite easily but if you’re on shared hosting, then this may be a problem because some hosting companies don’t allow wildcard mapping. If you manage to do it though, there will be another problem. If you had a subdomain like subdomain.example.com, it will stop working because of the wildcard now. So you’ll have to come up with a way to handle that.
I think the idea of hosting multiple sites/blogs is very appealing especially if you want to create niche websites with just a couple of pages. However WordPress 3.0 is not ideal for that purpose nor is WordPress MU. On the other hand WP Hive which is a plugin for WordPress works brillantly.
When I heard that WordPress 3.0 allows multisite creation, the first thought that came to mind was that WP Hive will become dead (redundant) now but that’s not the case. The official documentation of WordPress 3.0 shows that you need wildcard mapping whereas with WP Hive, you only need to add the domain you want have have wordpress on as an addon domain.
I like simplicity above everything else. For those on shared hosting, I suggest you have a look at WP Hive if having multisites/multiblogs on 1 wordpress installation is what you need.
Hi. I found your blog post here after much searching for “how to” information about WP Hive. I’d already found http://wp-hive.com/forums/forum/troubleshooting-and-how-to but I am not finding what I need there. Perhaps you can help.
I installed it at (let’s say) mywphivesite.com then I added a new domain (myotherdomain.com) which currently operates on another IP address which is hosted by the same Hostnine hosting service but on a different IP address.
Then I clicked the ‘Install’ button to presumably install Hive on myotherdomain.com and it opened that site but what happens next? Nothing happened. I dont get it.
The promise of simplicity with Hive appears to have vanished to I-know-not-where. Any chance you can kindly guide this lost wanderer?
Thanks in advance
Gary
@Gary if you have installed wordpress and the wp hive plugin at mywphivesite.com, then you will have to add myotherdomain.com as a parked domain on the server which hosts mywphivesite.com. With cpanel, it is easy to park the domain. Once this is done, then you can add myotherdomain.com in the hive by clicking the “Install” button. Have a look at the following links:
http://avinashsing.sunkur.com/2010/02/15/importing-existing-blogs-into-wp-hive-for-wordpress/
http://avinashsing.sunkur.com/2010/02/11/wordpress-mu-or-wp-hive-plugin-for-multiple-blogs-on-single-installation/
Thank you very much for a speedy response. I am now reviewing your 2 links.
Instead of a short prefix (the example you used was dmb_ for domainB.com), I used domainb_
Is that a problem? Is there a failure if the prefix is too long?
The conclusion I draw thus far is that all sites in the Hive are going to be on the SAME IP address. Right?
The prefix is used to create the wordpress tables for the other websites. For example wordpress has wp_posts, the hive plugin will creeate domainb_posts for the domainB.com website. If any problem occurs, it will be restriction on table name length imposed by MySql rather than the wphive plugin.
Yes all sites on the hive will have the same IP because you will need to park them on the main site where you uploaded the wordpress files and wphive plugin contents. Once you have sucessfully parked another domain, when you request say, anotherdomain.com, your request will be intercepted by wphive and it will read from the wordpress tables that were created for that domain during the hive installation.