It looks like a native part of WordPress, doesn’t it? I’ve tested it and it is fully multisite-compatible if you want to activate it across your network. Please note that this does not add gravatar support to your theme – it’s just a utility for your profile page. If the user doesn’t yet have a gravatar, the plugin displays a link to create one. This is very useful for new users who may not know how to add an avatar.

Download the free AP Gravatars plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Sharing media on a network is especially useful if you’re using multisite to manage a number of websites that you personally own and update. Or perhaps you are managing a group of student blogs and want to make a set of allowed images, video, and audio available for use. This plugin is perfect for that. Download Network Shared Media from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

It’s not an unreasonable question – you could happily use WordPress for many months, or even years, without exploring the possibilities that multisite offers.

So if you are a total multisite newbie, consider this your initiation.

In a Nutshell

Multisite allows you to manage several blogs under the “umbrella” of one WordPress installation. Each site is installed as a subdomain of the parent site (i.e. sub-site.yourdomain.com). However, you can use domain mapping to give each site its own unique domain name (i.e. www.sub-site.com).

As the owner of a multisite network, you have access to and control of every single site in the network from one WordPress dashboard. Sub-users are granted control of their specific sites. To them, the rest of the network is effectively invisible.

It is completely free to use and open source. It is actually available on any WordPress installation (post 3.0) – it is just turned off by default.

Benefits

Multisite (and its predecessor) was developed with a particular website network “model” in mind, the best example of which is WordPress.com. For those of you who don’t know, WordPress.com is in fact built upon the multisite platform – just scaled up massively. It is perhaps the best example of what is possible – a network of literally millions of blogs, all running off one WordPress installation.

So multisite is perfect for creating a community of related blogs, or providing your own custom hosting service. Another excellent example of an effective multisite setup is edublogs.org - a service that provides a tailored solution for academic institutions.

Multisite can also be used to create a network of unrelated sites that you can manage through one dashboard. All of the sites share the same WordPress installation, themes and plugins. What this means is that updating a theme or plugin across all sites on a multisite network is a one click affair, as opposed to having to access each site individually to upgrade.

You also have extended functionality – such as being able to post out to all blogs on a multisite network (by using this plugin).

Is It For You?

Many people use multisite to manage a group of unrelated websites, but it wasn’t designed with this primarily in mind. The core functionality was constructed on the assumption that you would be running a network of sites, like the real-life examples mentioned above.

When using multisite for unrelated websites, you must bear in mind the fact that there is no true separation. This can be problematic under various circumstances. For example, you could have a client who has specific upgrade requirements, or who wants to port their website onto alternative hosting. Both scenarios would raise major issues in a multisite environment.

However, as far as I am aware, it is the only viable free solution for creating a network of WordPress websites.

Is There An Alternative?

When it comes to setting up your own network of related sites in the style of WordPress.com, there is no worthy alternative – multisite is king. But the same can not be said if you are looking for a tool that allows you to easily manage multiple unrelated WordPress sites.

The market leader on that front is ManageWP – a tool that allows you to manage completely separate WordPress installations from one centralized dashboard. It also comes packed with a whole load of other features that can help you to effectively manage a group of websites.

Whilst ManageWP offers a limited free version of its tool, you will have to pay for full functionality.

Wrapping Up

Even if you choose not to use it (or have no reason to use it), you have got to love multisite. It is a free solution to managing multiple websites, even if it is often implemented in a round peg to square hole manner.

If you are looking to set up the next WordPress.com, you have just found your new best friend. If you are looking to manage multiple separates, it is a solution. But perhaps not the solution.

What Now?

If you are interested in exploring the potential of multisite further, the best place to start (in our humble opinion) is WPMU DEV’s multisite manual. The rest is down to you!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Nina Matthews Photography

Tom Ewer on Google+

Harmony Coburn

Today we start what will be a semi-regular series of interviews with Multisite owners to see how they’re running their businesses, what their challenges are, what their business models are, and even how much money they’re making.

Today’s interview is with Harmony Coburn of BetterWebsiteBuilders.com.

 
What are your sites?

http://betterwebsitebuilders.com (this is our primary multi-site)
http://extendedcarellc.org (this is our corporate client)
http://bettereverything.net (this is our seo blog platform – multi-site – that we hope to someday turn into a community of small businesses)

For purposes of this interview I will talk about BetterWebsiteBuilders.

BACKGROUND:

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself before you got into running your site? What is your background in?

I spent nearly 25 years in sales and marketing before discovering web design was my true calling. Web design has allowed me to combine all of my strengths and create a very healthy business for myself. You can read more about me here if you want more details.  (I am Harmony Coburn)

When did you start the site?

Betterwebsite builders was launched last spring – about this time a year ago.

Why did you start the site?

My business was founded in 2001 on the platform of offering a cost competitive “do it yourself” solution to truly small businesses that needed a website when designers were still charging 3k and up for “basic websites.” I knew there had to be a way for Joe Mom & Pop to leverage the web, and I did a lot of research to find a product that was developed by Trellix. It was a WYSIWIG website building tool that required no HTML knowledge to get a website up and running. I believe it is still offered by Earthlink.

After ten years, that product no longer met the growing needs of my DIY customers, so I knew I had to come up with something that would in order to avoid losing them and the recurring hosting revenue I make off of them.

I had developed several sites, as the designer/developer on WP for customers that are NOT do-it-yourselfers, and when I discovered how Multi-site works, I felt it would be a good replacement product for the old software.

RUNNING THE SITE:

Do you run the site alone?

Yes

How much time do you spend on it (per day/week)?

Two hours a day average.

How do you control splogs? / How much time spent? / Are they hard to spot?

I am not allowing instant access at this time.

How do you deal with people posting unwanted content? / Ever had issues?

We have a strict policy on inappropriate content. Since no one gets a site unless they contact us directly first, it’s pretty easy.

How do you handle your support issues?

Keep in mind, these are people that don’t have a clue (if they did they would be going to Weebly or some other “free” place, I’m sure). The people I get are people that like the personal contact (which is why I charge as much as I do). These are people that need their hands held. I offer a small amount of free support in the beginning – mostly by email where I direct them to one of the tutorials (if I’ve written it). If I have not written a tutorial, I will write one and then send them a link.

If they still can’t get it, they can buy phone support. In that case I will have them do a screen share using Join.me (free), or I will have them install logmein (I have an account with LogMeIn, so it’s easy to deploy).

I charge $65.00 per hour for support, but I only charge for actual minutes used. I have a “punch clock” installed on my computer so time tracking is easy. If they want to go that route I have them sign up for a billing account (I have hosted for years, so I have the AWBS billing platform) and make a deposit ($65.00 to $200.00 depending on how much help they are thinking they want).

Once we have established a working relationship, I will just invoice them monthly for the time used the previous month. What I have found is this model actually gets me more design and SEO clients than Do It Yourself clients – they start out wanting to do it themselves – then they find out how much work it takes and hire me to “just do it.”

I have decided to move away from the DIY model – I am going to just refer those people to Weebly (I am an affiliate). However, I plan to keep my Multisite for my own design business as well as a new “local” community I will be launching called DiscoverWhatsLocal.com … so many ideas, so little time.

Using multisite for my design clients saves a lot of time in the development process as well as the software maintenance. If WP Manage was not so pricy, I might go that direction instead of multisite – in fact I think I would much prefer it for the simple fact that I would prefer each client be installed on their own hosting account and not even need me for hosting.

When I started my hosting company, it was because shared hosting didn’t work for e-commerce, but these days I would just as soon let the client bring their own hosting. My passion is design and SEO/Marketing – I only became a hosting company out of necessity. A lot has changed in the last 12 years.

I started my business because I saw friends being “held hostage” by their web designer/hosting company – I never want my clients to feel it’s difficult to leave me. Of course, no one ever does leave me for that reason, but using Multisite does make it a little more difficult for them. What I mean is if they hire a new webmaster and give them their FTP info, there is a bit of “where the hell is my website” conversation that might have to happen… Is this really a bad thing? No.

Most of my clients have no clue their site is not “stand alone,” but I carry a small burden of guilt because I know the truth.

Do you use BuddyPress or some other type of community enhancing plugins?

Not at this time.

Do you focus on community/integration, or do you prefer to let blogs exist in a more private atmosphere?

Although we want to grow the community value of the WordPress Multi-site platform, we have not had time to yet, so each user sees themselves as a completely separate website.

What plugins do you use? (If you use too many to go into, what are some of the ones you wouldn’t want to do without?)

We use the following on every site:

• Gravity Forms
• WPMU Update notifications
• Login Image
• Remove WordPress Dashboard
• Easy Buttons
• Google Analytics for WP – multisite
• Subscribe by Email
• Display Widgets
• Image Widget
• Wp-jquery-colorbox
• Unattach

We offer many others, but the ones we see used (and enable ourselves) the most are:

• Portfolio Slidesho Pro
• WordPress Shopping cart by Tribulant
• WP-Property
• Less Than Web Testimonials

MARKETING

How did you first attract people to the site when it was new?

We had a base of clients.

How do you attract people to the site now? Is it the same?

We get new inquiries via our primary website from search engine results for “build your own website” and many referrals.

What do you find works best for attracting new members?

Word of mouth.

NUMBERS

How many sites do you have on your install?

32

How many new sites do you typically see per day/week?

Not really applicable to our model.

What’s your business model?

We are a Web Marketing / development company focused on TRULY small businesses. Our niche is offering the kinds of solutions and results that other companies only offer to businesses with large budgets for lower costs by leveraging open source solutions and keeping things simple.

I see on your site that you let users create a free site for 30 days. How is that strategy working out for you?

The 30 days free works out well. I haven’t had a lot of takers, but the ones that do it have stayed on OR hired me to do their site for them, so I guess that would be 100% conversion. Basically, if they take the time to actually build a site, they don’t want to let it go.

Only one client took me up on the “multiple sites” option, and he recently cancelled one of them. That came from my old model where the client could EASILY add another site at theirsite.com/2ndsitehere. They liked this because they felt they could get more use out of their single hosting account. With Multisite and domain mapping I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. (They can easily add a site but it’s at betterwebsitebuilders.com/2ndsitehere instead of theirdomain.com/2ndsitehere .)

Is your site profitable?

Yes.

What are your expenses per month? (hosting + any other expenses)

My fixed costs for hosting and other tools we need (for example all of our email clients are run through the Google Postini spam filtering system) are around $1000 per month.

Can you give us an idea about how much the site makes after expenses?

Well, those expenses cover a lot more than the WP multi-site, so I would say that my multi-site is primarily profit – that would be about $640/ month on that site alone in net profits.

FINAL  QUESTIONS/ADVICE

What are some things you like best about running the site?

• Ease of adding a new client.
• Ease of updating the software.

What are some things you like least about running the site?

• There are some challenges such as making sure the client logs in under the right URL to post so that the links in the emails sent to subscribers are correct and not at their sub site.
• Keeping up with the tutorials – support is tougher than I thought it would be. What is easy to me is not so easy to my customers

What advice would you give to someone that is thinking of starting a multisite?

1. Purchase a membership to WPMU
2. Participate in the community at WPMU
3. DONATE TO THE PLUGIN DEVELOPERS!!!

We are so fortunate to have these incredible developers that are willing to put themselves and their products out there on a wing and a prayer that they “might” get some money back for their time and effort.

I could not have such a successful business without Open Source!

******************************************************************

NOTE: Thanks to Harmony for letting us see behind her business a little bit. If you run a successful Multisite install, or you know someone who does who might be interested in participating in an interview, then drop me a line at joe@incsub.com. Interviews are conducted by email, so you can do them at your convenience.

Photo: vector retro studio microphone from Bigstock.

Joseph Foley on Google+

With all of the responsive WordPress themes flooding the market, it’s important to make sure that any embedded media will respond to screen sizes of various devices. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a responsive design? You don’t want to have unresponsive media breaking your responsive design or you might as well not invest in a responsive WordPress theme.

Responsive Video Embeds is a new plugin that will automatically resize your WordPress auto-embeds, including video and other iframes. It makes use of the auto-embed feature that is already built into WordPress, which automatically turns links to video embeds into a video player when you view the post. Auto-embeds can be eaily turned on by going to: Dashboard > Settings > Media. You’ll need to have those turned on in order to use the responsive video embeds plugin.

Responsive Video Embeds supports a wide range of video providers, including:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• DailyMotion
• Blip.tv
• Viddler
• hulu.com
• Revision 3
• Funny or Die
• WordPress.tv
• Scribd

Screenshots are of little use with this kind of plugin. You’ll definitely want to check out a live demo on the plugin’s homepage. Resize your browser to see the videos scale to fit the resolution.

WordPress Multisite Compatibility:

Good news for network admins: This plugin is was created to be compatible with WordPress Multisite. You won’t need to do anything except to make sure that you use the Network Activate feature to activate the plugin. That will enable responsive video resizing for embeds on every site on your network.

The Responsive Video Embeds plugin supports all the major video providers and is available for free from the WordPress repository. Add it to your site today for instant, worry-free responsive video embeds.

Want more responsive plugins and themes? Check out our recent articles:

• 16 Beautiful and Free Responsive WordPress Themes
• 10 Responsive WordPress Plugins to Complement Your Theme
• 10 Responsive Slider Plugins for WordPress

Sarah Gooding on Google+

A new plugin from Ipstenu aims to help network admins to keep their comments under control. Sitewide Comment Control lets you ban, spam or moderate unregistered commenters across your network. It doesn’t replace the per-site blacklists but rather adds on to it so that spammers can’t hop around your network to continue spamming.

Sitewide Comment Control has a special “blackhole” feature where you can elect that comments from spammers will be sent to the blackhole, never to be seen. You can also select for them to go to spam or to moderation.

This plugin should help multisite admins save some time from having to spam commenters who start to troll the network after being banned from one site. Download Sitewide Comment Control for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

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.

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

Multisite User Registration Manager

This plugin puts in place 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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

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.

Download Plugin

Sarah Gooding on Google+

If you need a solid way to set up a WordPress multisite test environment, give the BitNami WordPress Multisite Stack a spin and let us know how it compares to other development environments you’ve tried.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

You can also change the expiry period to be something other than 30 days if you like. It comes with a define that you can use in your wp-config.php file called ‘TMG_AEP_EXPIRY’,. Just set the value to the number of seconds until you want the login to expire.

Multisite Compatible

If you’re running a network of sites on WordPress, you’ll be pleased to know that the plugin is also multisite compatible when dropped in the mu-plugins directory.

Expire User Passwords is available for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Hide Inactive Sites is a new plugin only for use on multisite networks. It uses WP_Cron to update and hide inactive sites based on the routine checks you set. The developer, Eric Juden, has created a filter in the plugin to edit the query of the sites that are returned. He’s also included hooks to enable other developers to add additional custom options to each of the settings.

If you want to automate the process of hiding inactive sites, download the Hide Inactive Sites plugin for free from the WordPress repository. It will keep your network focused on showcasing the most active sites, instead of being a gateway for hundreds of empty blogs.

Sarah Gooding on Google+