Managing a WordPress Multisite network can be a lot of work, but when you have the right tools at your disposal you can easily cut that time in half. I thought it was time to write an updated post with some new plugins for your multisite toolbox, most of which have been released within the past couple of months.
Whether you’re new to running WordPress Multisite or have been hosting your own network for some time, you’re sure to find many of these plugins useful for managing your sites. Grab a cup of coffee and start installing your favorites.
Multisite Privacy Plugin
Multisite Privacy is another one of those must-have plugins for WordPress networks. It adds four more levels of privacy to site options and allows you to control them across all blogs – or optionally to allow users to override them. The new privacy options include: Allow any registered users on the network to view site; Allow only subscribers or users of the site to view it; Allow access to only administrators of the site; or require a single password to access the site.
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Hide Welcome Panel for Multisite
WordPress 3.3 comes with a fancy new welcome panel to guide users who are being introduced to WordPress for the first time. Ordinarily it shows when new sites are created. This plugin keeps the panel from showing for owners and users of new sites on your WordPress Multisite network.
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WP Recent Network Posts
This plugin gives you a widget that lets you display recent posts from multiple blogs within your network, as well as choose how many posts you want to display and change style easily. You can also optionally show thumbnails and blog titles with the recent posts.
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Network Plugin Auditor
The Network Plugin Auditor lets you track which plugins were used on which sites. It adds columns to your network admin to show which sites are using each plugin, saving you the trouble of having to visit every dashboard to find out.
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Organizational Message Notifier
If you need a way to communicate announcements to blog admins across your network, this is the plugin for you. It enables you to post notifications for blog admins that will be shown until they mark all messages as read. Network super admins can view who has not read which message yet and can delete notifications manually.
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Multisite Plugin Manager
The Multisite Plugin Manager is pretty much a must-have plugin for any multisite network. Previously known as WPMU Plugin Manager, it lets you change plugin permissions for sites across your network in one centralized dashboard panel. One of the best features of this plugin is the ability to mass activate or deactivate a plugin on all sites in your network – something that will save you quite a bit of time from having to do it manually.
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New Blog Templates
New Blog Templates will simplify your life if you find yourself frequently setting up new sites on your network. It gives you the ability to create a template, or multiple templates, and then duplicate every single setting (content, theme, categories etc.) for every new blog that is created, saving you a ton of time.
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Network Latest Posts
This is another plugin for showing the latest posts across your network. You can display the list using the built-in widget or a shortcode that you can add to any page or post. You can select the number of posts, the days to limit, and the option to show titles only.
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Hide Inactive Sites
This is a very useful plugin that will check for inactive sites on your network, according to the criteria that you set, and will automatically hide them for you. After you set the parameters for the routine checks, WP_Cron will kick in to update and hide the inactive sites.
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Multisite Privacy Plugin
Multisite Privacy is another one of those must-have plugins for WordPress networks. It adds four more levels of privacy to site options and allows you to control them across all blogs – or optionally to allow users to override them. The new privacy options include: Allow any registered users on the network to view site; Allow only subscribers or users of the site to view it; Allow access to only administrators of the site; or require a single password to access the site.
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WPMS Site Maintenance
This is a maintenance mode plugin written specifically for use with WordPress networks. It allows a super admin to put his entire network, main site, or subsites into maintenance mode while displaying a cusotmizable maintenance page.
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Multisite Dashboard Switcher
Multisite Dashboard Switcher lets multisite admins quickly switch between dashboards while navigating around the network. It makes managing settings across sites more convenient with fewer clicks required for getting from one site to another.
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Multisite Plugin Stats
This is a simple plugin that shows plugin activations across all your sites. It is particularly useful for checking to see which plugins are not being used at all so that you can deactivate those as needed. You can also find out which are the most popularly used plugins on your network.
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Ada WPMS Sitewide Feed
This plugin creates four separate RSS 2.0 feeds from posts, comments, pages, and one combined [posts & pages] across all blogs on your site. It will exclude the first comment and page of a blog, as well as private, spam, mature and deleted blogs.
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Avatar Privacy
Avatar Privacy gives you more options when working with Gravatars on your site. It lets users and commenters opt in or out of using Gravatars and it doesn’t publish encrypted E-Mail addresses for non-members of gravatar.com. You also have the option to use default avatar images hosted on your server rather than gravatar.com.
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Multisite User Registration Manager
This WordPress registration plugin puts in place a process for registration moderation. Potential new site owners can request registration through a form embedded via a shortcode. Then they must be granted access by the blog admin and then the super admin before receiving login information.
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RPS Sitemap Generator
This plugin provides a lightweight XML sitemap generator with an easy-to-use interface. It works perfectly with WordPress multisite, giving each blog in the network its own unique sitemap.
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Visual Editor Biography
Visual Editor Biography adds a TinyMCE visual editor to the “Biographical Info” profile field. This helps blog authors to more easily enter information about themselves with the ability to easily add links, paragraphs, etc.
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Hyper Admins
Hyper Admins simplifies administration tasks for super-admins. Specifically, it makes two things more convenient: view any theme on any site without enabling it and
access any site through Admin Bar -> My Sites, without having a role on it.
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Add User Autocomplete
This is a super useful plugin for adding new existing to blogs. It adds autocomplete to Dashboard > Users > Add New > Add Existing User, which makes this process a breeze.
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Superadmin Helper
This plugin makes use of the WordPress Logging Service to log basic events in the network, including user profile update, emails sent by WordPress, logging in, password resets, activated blogs, and much more.
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Force User Login Multisite
This is a simple plugin that makes your WordPress blog private unless the user is logged in. You can also set a minium user level.
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Sitewide Recent Images
This is a cool widget that lets multisite blogs feature recent images from all the blogs on the network. It was written to be highly optimized for performance and scalable for large networks. The plugin grabs images attached to posts and excludes blogs that have privacy options enabled.
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Add Multiple Users to WordPress
This plugin gives admins the ability to bulk add WordPress user registrations using a range of tools available as an extra admin page under your Users tab. You can add new users using manual input, CSV and email data, or by adding existing users from a Multisite Network.
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User Switching
User Switching is for blog admins. It lets you quickly switch between user accounts in WordPress at the click of a button. This is very useful for when you are performing tests and have to log in and out with different accounts. This plugin handles the user switch instantly. It’s secure and even works with BuddyPress.
Thanks mate for this :)
Thanks fpr sharing this, is it possible to have multisite and buddypress as one installation? can you refer me to any article you have written on that.
I was really hoping to find a plugin that allows you to go to the theme editor without having to go back to the Network Admin Dashboard to get to it. You know of a way to do that or know of a plugin that adds the editor option to each site on the network?
Great post, informative and let me see a few plugins I didn’t naturally find.
+1 on Danny’s question.
I was really looking for the plugin that display latest posts from all my MU-sites blogs. Thanks for the information about “WP Recent Network Posts” plugin.
Is there a way to create a single post but have it show up on the main WordPress site plus a select bunch of the subdomains on the same network?
You have my gratitude…. Forever
Hello Sarah
I have an MU site that times out when I try to post a blog or page to all the sites. My admin says there are too many sites (only about 80). He is proposing to re-write the multipost logic and that seems expensive to me.
Is there a better way to go? Perhaps a plug-in that someone else wrote?
Thanks
Steve