One of the most common questions about using WordPress Multisite is, “Can I import an already existing site into Multisite?”
Similarly, another common question is, “Can I peel off a site on a Multisite install and turn it into a single installation?”
The answer to both of these questions is yes, and we’re going to go through how to do that in this post. Essentially it’s as easy as using the Import/Export functions found under the Tools menu in your WordPress admin area.
What Gets Imported
Even the average user can see that WordPress is a powerful and flexible platform. But there’s more to WordPress than meets the eye.
Just below the surface, and somewhat hidden away, there is an even more powerful mode that WordPress possesses – a mode called Multisite.
Enabling this mode allows you to turn a single WordPress installation into a network of sites. Thousands of sites, if you like. Hundreds of thousands. Even millions.
If you run a WordPress Multisite install, then no doubt you’ve had your hands full trying to manage and/or display posts from across your network.
At WPMU DEV, we’ve built a whole host of plugins that help you do that, everything from Recent Global Posts Widget to Global Site Search to Global Site Tags and many more.
What you might not realize is that all of those plugins rely on a very powerful behind-the-scenes plugin called Post Indexer.
And so today is very good news for Multisite owners because the Post Indexer just got even more powerful.
What It Does
We’re happy to announce that WPMU DEV has released a brand new plugin – the YouTube Featured Video plugin.
This simple, flexible widget lets you select videos from a YouTube channel and then feature them in your sidebar. If you look over to the bottom of the right hand sidebar here on wpmu.org, you’ll see it action.
We wanted this for ourselves, and so we thought a number of you might like it too.
How This Plugin Can Help You
WPMU DEV’s Autoblog plugin is a powerful tool that pulls in RSS feeds and publishes them to your site. Many may think that just means it’s a device for splogs (spam blogs).
While a tool like Autoblog could be used for that, there’s isn’t much point in it. Search engines learned long ago that those types of sites don’t add much, and so they’ve devalued them into near oblivion.
For most tools, their value is only fully realized in the right hands. And that’s the case for Autoblog.
The Autoblog plugin as a splog creator is pretty much worthless.
Sure, the world has changed in many ways since the rise of the web, but some things are so iconic that they’ve stayed the same even if they don’t really make sense in a digital environment.
Take, for example, coupons. Even though it would be physically impossible to cut them out of a website, many still choose to show a dotted line around online coupons as if you could. That dotted line triggers something deep inside many people. It means “DEAL” or “DISCOUNT!”
Let’s face it – even though they often contain vital information, footers generally don’t get much respect.
Unless someone is looking for information that might typically be found in the footer area, many people won’t give footers a second look. To readers, typically footers mean “the end,” “time to move on,” “that’s enough,” “how do I get out of here?”
But if you have a footer that surprises in some way, something that offers a little more, something that pops out at the visitor, then you just may catch their attention enough to engage them a little more.
The biggest change in the recently released 3.5 version of WordPress was undoubtedly the way media is handled. Not only did the Media Library change, but the way galleries are created also changed – all for the better.
Below we’ll go over how to insert a photo gallery in a WordPress post. We’ve got both a video tutorial as well as text and images.
First up, a video of the process.
Opening the Media Manager
To create a gallery, you need to click on the Media Manager button at top left of your editing screen.
It doesn’t take long for many to realize that WordPress’ default search isn’t the greatest. A large part of this is probably due to the fact that it ranks results based on date rather than relevancy. Another part is because it doesn’t search everything that could be searched (excerpts, tags, comments, etc.).
We’ve gone through the best WordPress search plugins we could find and pulled out seven that rise to the top. Not all of these plugins focus on improving the same aspects, and so that’s something to keep in mind when deciding which one is best for your site.
1. Relevanssi
If you need to insert content from a Page into other places in your site, such as in a sidebar or a category page, then that’s easily done with this little trick I discovered from Scott Nelle.
As Scott mentions, he does this for clients so that they can easily add content to a sidebar. He just creates a Page and labels it so that they know that’s the Page they need to edit to change their content area in the sidebar.
