Asking for Opinions if I should have a multi-site install

  • I’ll try to keep this brief but I would love some opinions from the WP community and professionals about a site I’m taking on.

    About me:
    I hack other peoples themes, give them nice CSS, play a little with PHP, use plugins to create features, etc.
    I have never built a theme or plugin from scratch.
    I have previously worked on implementing on WPMU and then removing it (it was awful).

    About the site:
    https://www.acmi.tv
    The site is a WPMU site that hosts 4 websites: Home, Membership, Video on Demand (an archive of video posts), News (another archive of video posts).

    The organization wants to make some navigation changes and design improvements. Do I advise the company to unravel from the WPMU since it’s unnecessary? This would be a massive undertaking. What are the pros and cons? Do you see an advantages to the WPMU I should utilize?

    I would love to hear from anyone else as I usually work alone and don’t get to bounce ideas off people. Thank you!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • It is really difficult (i.e., impossible) to give advice in instances like this. The question to be answered is, does it work for you? If it does, keep it. If not, ditch it.

    Do I advise the company to unravel from the WPMU since it’s unnecessary?

    Getting rid of multisite would mean getting rid of your subdomains. So https://membership.acmi.tv/ would have to become https://acmi.tv/membership/ (i.e., a category) or something similar. (Of course, you could leave a 301 redirect at https://membership.acmi.tv/ to avoid confusing people.)

    Why is multisite unnecessary? Too much server overhead? Too difficult to switch sites in the backend? (I have also used multisite, and found this aspect of WP annoying, to say the least.) Do users find it confusing?

    Is the effort it’s going to take to undo multisite doing to be worth the effort saved in the future? (You can export pages and posts to an XML file from multisite and then import then to a new, non-multisite WP site, so it may not be as much work as you think.)

    Do you see an advantages to the WPMU I should utilize?

    Multisite is a good option if you have a different group of people working on each site. This keeps them from stepping on each other’s toes. If, however, it’s only a handful of people (who communicate well with each other) or a single person in the backend, it may make sense to get rid of multisite.

    I hack other peoples themes, give them nice CSS, play a little with PHP,

    Please tell me you are doing this via a child theme. (Editing theme files directly is always a bad idea.)

    I would love to hear from anyone else as I usually work alone and don’t get to bounce ideas off people. Thank you!

    Same here. If you interested in collaborating on coding projects in the future, I recommend signing up for a Github account. (Github = great happiness—for me, at least.)

    I have never built a theme or plugin from scratch.

    I encourage you to try this if you like playing around with code, especially WordPress code. It’s quite fun—addicting, actually.

    Thread Starter megart04

    (@megart04)

    kjodle

    Whoa! Thank you for the amazing feedback.

    I just posted about this issue again forgetting I tried to tackle it four months ago.

    The biggest issue we’ve run into with Multisite is that the videos we posts at blog posts on our core site and the news site should all be searchable under one database and are not because they’re hosted on different sites. That would be the biggest push for change.

    Also – I always use a child theme and I wish I had enough time to mess around making a theme or plugin but someone else always is doing it better than me so I usually start from there. I am on Github but intimidated since I don’t feel like a proficient coder but more a designer.

    Thank you so much for your time!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Asking for Opinions if I should have a multi-site install’ is closed to new replies.