A very little-know and hidden feature in WordPress MU is the ability to add a customize page that is displayed when a blog is suspended or archived. Only Site Admins can archive or suspend a blog, and you can do this in the Site Admin -> Blogs menu. Hover over the blog in question and see the extra links. Deactivate,...

Andrea was looking for a Twitter digest plugin so that she could start making a permanent backup of her tweets because the twitter API only provides access to the last 3200 tweets. The plugin she asked me to look at was Twitter Digest by Tim Beck. The reason she asked me to look at it was that it the...

When you install WPMU by default the subdomain option is checked. This is for blogs in the format of username.yourdomain.com. There are two steps that need to be done to your server in order for this to work. In Apache, there needs to be a line in the domain’s virtual hosts section as follows: ...

We’ve all seen it, the massive tags results page at wordpress.com. I’ve been asked a few times how it was done, then realized while writing it out for someone that I hadn’t yet written up and posted a full-blown tutorial. So, here you go. The biggest puzzle piece you need to know is...

In the Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins, third on Ozh’s list is “3. What? 87 new rows in the option table?”. In any of the plugins (and themes) I’ve looked at that use the built-in option saving functionality each field on the options page is being saved...

All of our children have a blog on one of our WPMU installs. One of them asked Andrea if we could add a facebook plugin so she could follow her facebook stream from her blog. The plugin that Andrea found that she thought would do the trick was the Facebook Dashboard Widget. After Andrea installed the...

Sometimes this happens, you’ve built the site and have to or want to change the domain it’s on. Or you did dev work on a different domain and now it’s time to go live. The domain name is actually stored in numerous places in the database, as well as one line in wp-config.php. Every...

Periodically, I and others update the codex entry on how to upgrade WPMU. If you are going from 2.7 upwards, the easiest thing is to just click the link in the upgrade notice and let it handle it automatically. This works if you’ve made no hacks. If you’ve changed ANY core files, they WILL...

I’ve answered this one quite a few times in the past couple of weeks and realized that I don’t have a posts specifically for this subject. It’s buried in other posts. There are a few different ways to pull in these posts, and none of them are theme issues. They are done entirely with...

One thing you really need to do when running a blog platform of your own is to secure the site. Not just the software you use, but the server as well. There have been many tips about securing WordPress. In fact, the same twelve tips seem to be making the rounds. While they are good tips in general, in...