MU’ing WP

If you did not catch this on twitter (our twitter links are in the sidebar), I was experimenting with possibilities of how one could go about merging the WP & WPMU codebases. Andrea wrote an initial post and yesterday Matt Mullenweg confirmed it in this comment.

Most of the programming that I’ve done in the last 20 years has been modifying other people’s code. Recently, I have worked mostly with WPMU but a few years ago I was writing plugins and theme functions for WP. After some thought on the task of merging the WP & WPMU codebases I felt that the easiest route would be to modify WPMU so that it would run on the WP database structure without altering the WP data.

The process that I followed was

• Fresh install of WP 2.7.1
• Wrote the second post in the blog
• Move the WP folder and replaced it with a WPMU 2.7.1 install
• Edited the wp-config to use the WP database
• Worked my magic without modifying any of the WP tables or WPMU core files
• a line in wp-config + 2 plugins = wpmu running on wp install
• buddypress member on wpmu over wp
• Buddypress home on wpmu over wp
• edit apache vhost document root + restart = back to WP from WPMU (to verify that the WP DB remained intact)

I’m fairly sure that quite a few people are interested in knowing specifically what I did. I’m familiar with that feeling. However, having had a day or so to give it some thought, developing a common code base which would run on either a WP or WPMU database would be a nice to add to my list of accomplishments. Those interested in the potential of the common code base could purchase a support subscription at musupport.net. Enough subscriptions would allow Andrea & I to reduce our client load such that I could dedicate more time to a common code base.