You can keep up on the progress toward release by visiting the dev blog. Andy’s (the dev) personal blog also carries CommentLuv news.

Andrea & I have had the pleasure of working with Andy over the last few months building the latest version of CommentLuv. The new CommentLuv comes with a new look, a new API, additional features and a new name: The ComLuv network. One of the new features is a blog network powered by WPMU. Members of the blog network have the ability to add up to 5 ComLuv sources including one twitter account and one digg account.

The development work for the ComLuv network was distributed among the three of us where Andy wrote the plugins for several blog platforms, Andrea put together the ComLuv Blog Network, and I wrote the server API for the plugin and an API for the ComLuv blog network to interact directly with the ComLuv server.

From a personal perspective, this project has been a great deal of fun. Most development projects are not built from the ground up. The server API and the corresponding handshaking with the plugin and other APIs are all new and coded from scratch. Excepting a few requirements and working through the handshaking with the comment plugins, the design & development of the rest of server API was in my hands. I’m really looking for it to do well.

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Not only has the design changed, I took the opportunity to revamp the site and move the contents over to a WordPressMU install. We’ve set up a private (closed registration) site of our own on a smaller scale; to use as a development site, to host some smaller client sites, and to host our own individual blogs. Given we had at least 5 separate WordPress installs to take care of, it makes sense. Ron already moved his personal blog over to this WPMU install a few months back. The added bonus to that is we can now clean up some web accounts on the server too.

As a brief overview, the steps for moving things over was pretty straightforward. I had set up a working blog at wpmututes.ourhostingdomain.com (not a real domain ), uploaded the new theme, and started making my tweaks to it. The biggest thing I did was add a chunky widgetized footer. You can do the same using the linked tutorial from Leland at Theme Lab. Mostly I wanted to make sure everything looked the way I wanted it to, including changing the site name graphic in the header.

I’m completely skipping over the fact that I spent a good four hours in just *choosing* the theme I wanted to reflect the site. I do have a theme design specially made for me in PSD format, but I’m only halfway through coding it, hit a snag, and figured I’d just better go ahead with another theme and save that design for another time. (it’s gorgeous: it will see the light of day at some point, but maybe on my personal blog.)

The next thing I did was import my data into the working blog. I know we all harp on the forums that the safest way to do this is via a database transfer using this handy tutorial. I wanted to double-check everything, so this time I went for upgrading the old site first so that each install was the same version. I then used the Export on the old site and the Import here on the working blog. And what do you know? It worked. I was as surprised as anyone. My official suggestion now is to try the Export/Import method if you have a small number of posts & authors. If it works; great. If not, use the database method. How to Import a single WordPress blog into WordPressMU with phpmyadmin.

Now that I had the data imported, I had a few extra things to tweak. My page titles were too long for the header, and there were too many of them. I shortened a couple of titles and widened the div container. I also rearranged it so the least popular page dropped off. (Bonus points if you can remember what it was.)

My categories were overspilling the menu bar as well. I moved some categories to be child categories for suitable parents and that fixed that. There’s a lovely drop-down on the nav bar for the sub-categories.

The theme I’m using has a great options page for deciding content placement and I went with the more popular – and hopefully easier to navigate – magazine-style front page. Since category ID numbers wind up slightly different in MU, I had to go re-check what they were on the MU system and not the originating site. Another good reason to have these things in an option page and not hardcoded in the theme’s files.

I also had to set up some of my widgets all over again, as an import doesn’t get that. It doesn’t get the list of activated plugins either. Luckily, since I had a working copy and a live site, I could work with both sites open in multiple tabs and copy / paste a lot of information. And since the sites live on the same server, I copied over the plugin files from one web account to the other via ssh. It took about a half hour to an hour to test the plugins on the new site and make sure they all worked properly.

One isn’t working as expected, so the related posts area built in the theme is showing no results until I fix it.

After checking everything, I decided to to the domain switch. It doesn’t matter really what order you do it in, but in my case I knew I was done on the working/new blog for a bit, so I domain mapped it to its new domain: same as the old site domain.

I then logged in to my domain registrar (goDaddy) changed the nameservers back to the Godaddy parked ones, and added an A record pointing to the IP of my WPMU install. I’ve already got the server set up to handle any domain that comes in and direct it appropriately. I checked to make sure the TTL value of the domain records was down as low as possible, and in just over a half-hour the domain was now pointing at the new install. Yay!

For client sites with as little down time as possible, I do the DNS records first, then domain map it.

It was a good dry run to ask on twitter, as a few people immediately found a couple of issues. Since I imported on the working domain, all image links within the posts themselves were pointing to the now non-existent subdomain. Gotta love absolute links on upload. The files were still on the server, just under the wrong name. There were only a few images, so I edited the posts directly. For a lot, you can do a find and replace via SQL right on the database.

Another thing I missed was the initial “hello world!” post from when I created the working blog and the default uncategorized category. I still have to tweak that as I messed up renaming it. I had initially decided to just delete a category with a small number of posts, hopefully moving those posts to the default category, and then renaming the default to the category I deleted. That didn’t work, so I’ll have to go digging, as well as find those posts. It’s also the reason there’s an “installation2″ category. What can I say? It’s a nice weekend outside and very distracting.

Otherwise, I have a short list of boring details to take care of, like handle my google analytics via plugin instead of in the theme file, and without interfering with other sites on the same install, as well as move over the links. If you see anything else wonky that I haven’t mentioned above, feel free to let me know. I absolutely did not check how it looked in IE, especially IE6, since my stats show that very few of my readers use it.

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Warhammerblogs provides blog space to fans of the game Warhammer. I don’t play this game, but I do play some other ones and can appreciate the efforts that go into fan spaces. Especially gorgeous ones. When Herb, the lead designer, sent me the PSDs to work from, I was in awe of his skills. Really. He’s very talented.

The biggest different feature is the home page, which we called the News Grid. This has many different sections that gives the visitor a quick overview of the site and help draw them further in. We did a custom login (naturally) and a heavily customized signup page. There’s a support forum which is also branded to match the rest of the site.

Other notable features:
- top viewed articles
- sitewide tags
- sitewide search
- featured articles
- custom themes
- avatars
- main page and blog-front login & quick-link areas

This site is the brainchild of Kevin Bane, and has been a long time coming. The attention to detail in this is incredible. I’m probably too close to the project to point out a lot of things, but seriously folks, a lot of time was spent on every single element to get it just perfect. I think we all learned quite a bit on this, as well as had our skill levels grow exponentially. I know I learned a ton.

These guys are ones to watch, as they have more sites in development which I expect to be just as outstanding.

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What can I say about unBlog.fr?  C’est magnifique!

With a clean, pleasing front page with bright colors and well designed sections, you don’t need to know much French to navigate and appreciate this great WPMU site.

Apparently, a lot of French speakers like this blog too as there are over 200,000 blogs and 1,000,000 posts.

A pleasing homepage features a tag cloud, a few featured blog icons, and a neat array of design elements. The most popular blog categories are general, family, personal journal, photo, music arts, sports and travel with more than 2000 blogs in each category.

Two big reasons for its popularity are: C’est facile et gratuit! [It's easy and free.]

It is funny that some aspects of blogging are universal:
Any guesses for “adrese email” and “nom de blog”?

On each blog page, the subtle footer lets users create a blog or navigate to the unBlog front page.

Another nice touch is the consistent use of the unblog.fr logo such as in the WP login page.unBlog.fr logo instead of WP logo on login page.

unBlog.fr has required several changes and performance enhancements to accommodate its large scale.
http://quentin.unblog.fr/wordpress-mu-wpmu/
Those interested in a more technical discussion can read about several types of caching:
Caching in WPMU, database query cache, PHP Op-code cache, WordPress object cache, WP-Cache and reverse proxy caching.
So overall, a great WPMU site and some technical details on caching if you are looking to improve performance.

****

Merci beacoup to Kevin for the review.

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From a user perspective, it’s different from pretty much all parent/baby sites out there that I have seen, and I have four children. That’s what they did well first off: provide the user with something different AND a way to connect familes together. The site takes a blog and completely turns it on its edge, calling it a scrapbook or just book and featuring photos, videos and then posts about the baby in your life.

There’s the clean slick design on the main pages, with the bare minimum – but important – menu items in handy locations. I was impressed to see that the color scheme didn’t have a hint of pink or blue. When you get to the signup page, there’s a whole pile of information collected and you can even add additional users to the blog when you create it. Even the activation email is restyled and customized.

The backend is completely overhauled and integrated with the design of the main site. I hardly recognized a thing. It’s been stripped down and reoganized specifically for their audience. They’ve even provided their own custom themes for users. The main focus is on the sharing of pictures, with the added bonus of telling the story to go along with it. Even the baby has their own profile. I like how the page headings say “The Life of  *babyname*” and make it a celebration of sharing all about the baby.

Nostalgia time:
You know when I first had children, we had to write things down on paper in baby books. By the time I had baby number three, she was 6 months old before I even bought a baby book for her (on clearance too). But baby #4 was a big surpise after an eight-year gap, and by then I was blogging my own life, so hers has been documented all along. I really wish I had known about a site like this. My baby boy, kid #1, is 20 and married so maybe I can use it for future grandchildren.

To get deeper into the technical aspects, I asked Beau if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, despite my legendary typos and his travelling. We talked about how long it took to create (about 6 months) and how much time is spent on the site on a daily basis (a couple hors a day at least), and the good stuff: custom work and challenges.

What was the biggest challenge in getting it running?

Beau: Because of the approach that we took, we had *heaps* of additional development required to replicate/create a customized “admin panel” for our users. That has taken a lot of work, and required me to really get to know WPMU on a level that has at times been painful . Our custom posting/uploading process has also taken a lot of work, but I think it’s worth it.

Got any inside goodies or tidbits?

Beau: We’re working on a couple new themes right now, and are hoping to release our first external integration for providing extra functionality to users (that’s all I’ll give you for now ).

Now I’m intrigued. Any tips for fellow MU admins?

Beau: Don’t be afraid to use plugins. There are *thousands* of plugins out there, so go and explore and see what you can find. If there’s something that is licensed in a way that makes it OK for you to use, then go for it. If there’s no license, email the author and find out (get an email to keep on file for your record). Also don’t be afraid to get an existing plugin and hack it to pieces if it’s remotely related to what you want to do. Often just looking into plugins will help you find some additional hooks/filters that you didn’t know about that can be handy.

I’m also looking to put together a bit of a general dashboard because I know we want to see some key metrics like how many people are registering each day, the number of posts they’re posting, people per “blog”, etc etc. So if I ever get around to making that remotely “nice”, maybe that will be available as a plugin as well!

I have a feeling if I said you had custom plugins you’re planning on releasing, you’d get hassled a lot.

Beau: Feel free to mention that I’m wanting to release plugins. People bugging me will give me a bit more motivation to get it out there And if anyone wants to sponsor the release of a specific portion of functionality as a plugin then that’s possible as well. I already have one under development/polishing in this manner. As a rough idea, here are a couple of the plugins I’m hoping to get out:

- “Slick Comments” (the completely AJAX-powered, nested comments that we use, with avatars where available)
- “WPMU Invitations” (allowing users to send out email invitations to an email address, and then when the recipient signs up, they are automatically added to the blog of the inviter, with the role they specified)
- “Avatar Manager” (simple system for uploading an image and then cropping 2 versions for use within your templates/profiles etc — this is being sponsored now)
- “Beau’s Blog Meta” (ability to store blog–user meta data in a table which is much more efficient for “global” queries

There are a couple other possibilities, but I need to see how much sense it makes to cut them out as stand-alone plugins.

***

Well, I for one can’t wait to see what else Beau and Ray can bring to the community. Well done guys. I bet your moms are proud.

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Seriously though – if you’re looking for MU-based sites blazing a path forward, you have to keep your eye on Edublogs, especially if you are in education.  James and Andrew have also been key contributors to the WPMU community at large. There’s so many things to mention I’m not surewhere to even start and I’ll probably forget a ton of things.

Design – clean, content-based, non-distracting. Plenty of goodies on the main page.

Support/ease of use – TONS of support, even video tutorials and helpful icons. I’ve glanced at their support forum and they’re doing things right in there too. James has a deep well of patience, I think. There’s FAQs and a support blog with tips. Even the main blog is frequently updated to keep users in the loop.

Features -  here they have tons too. A great selection of plugins (even for podcasting) and a number of premium features.

These guys know their audience because they are also educators. Who better to know what teachers of the future need than… teachers?  As well as being a stand-up kind of guy, James also has a great spirit of learning and sharing. They support the edublog awards and have also started spin-off sites and services like educampus.

I didn’t just pick this site because I kind of know James and Andrew from hanging around online, I picked it because it’s a darn good site, run by smart people, and all-around very well done. This is the kind of site to watch.

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Seshn is how a niche-based MU site should be done. The main page is tight, laid out well, focused sharply on the demographic, and – dare I say it – sick.

They’ve got great use of images there, I’m loving the font – simple done well is fine indeed – and they’ve condensed all the latest news from around the site into a compact area that is not too compact. I like how individual blog author avatars are all pulled in and change on a refresh. The featured or latest post at the top with the large image and a bit of text? I’m in love with that, seriously.
When you visit the individual blogs, the toolbar at the top integrates right in with the look of the rest of the site. Bonus points for the Facebook and Myspace page links. Even though individual blogs have the same layout, there’s enough different in the header and background images so that you don’t get lost. You can tell they spent a lot of time thinking about projecting the right image and knowing their audience. Which they do very well.

And in a further brilliant move, you have to apply for a blog, rather than just signup. This help keep the site clean and probably helps keep the content very, very relevant.

The only things I would change or add is a customized login page and a photo gallery. I did get lost looking at the awesome photos in the photoblog. With those two changes, I think the site would then be perfection. All they need is a little bit of a push, maybe from a large well-known sponsor, and they’ll be at the top of their game.

Well done guys.

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Wildlife Direct is a somewhat modfied version of WPMU that provides blogs to conservation workers in Africa and other parts of the world. Visitors to the site can choose blogs in specific areas or according to certain kinds of endangered species. It’s been fascinating to read along a few of the various blogs to find out what is going on a world away from me.

I’m sitting here in the wilds of eastern Canada, five feet of snow on my lawn, yet I can find out what the Maassai are doing to help their local lion population. From reading along, I have found out that sometimes writing a blog post can take up to three hours with the slow speeds of satellite internet and getting a clear signal. I have a satellite internet connection here by the lake, so that bit I can relate to.

The main page has some aggregate content with a highlighted image from a featured posts, and a short list of some of the blogs, depending on immediate issues. Each blog is set up with the same template, custom header and a donation area in the sidebar. Visitors can donate directly to the cause of their choice, and they can see how the money is being spent, almost in real time. It cuts out the large charity organization and brings the problems directly into your feed reader, where you – the visitor – can hopefully do something to help.

To me, this is the pinnacle of goodness that the open source movement can achieve. For every dozen splog sites out there or so, somewhere there’s a site owner doing good in the world and making a difference.

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