This post is a quick summary of how to enable multisite on your WordPress install.  You should be starting from a fresh WordPress install, anything else can cause issues.

For a complete description of multisite and setting up multisite see the great reference created by Mika Epstein & Andrea Rennick:

http://halfelf.org/ebooks/wordpress-multisite-110/

1) Enable Multisite in WordPress

In your wp-config.php file, right before the line /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ add:

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’,true);

Save!

2) Click on the “Tools” menu item in the dashboard.

You should now see a new item “Network Setup”.

Click on “Network Setup”, and complete the Create a Network of WordPress Sites page.  If you are not sure about the options, see the ebook above.

3) You will get a page that looks something like this after clicking install.  Follow the 3 steps on the page to complete the setup. NOTE!!! Your settings will be different from the ones shown below.

Login to your site and you now have a network of sites or “multisite”.

There are many config settings that should be checked before using your site, see the ebook for details if you are not familiar with configuring a network of sites.

WordPress will be getting a new theme with version 3.5, the long awaited TwentyTwelve (which was supposed to ship in 3.4, but was not quite ready).  Since it was almost ready for 3.4, it has been available for several months now if you knew where to find it.  I’ve already built client site using it as a parent for a custom child theme.

It’s a great theme to use as a parent since it is so plain, there is not a lot that you need to undo before you make it the way you need for the child theme.  Also, as the newest official WordPress theme it will also be supported for a while.

It is a lot easier to work with TwentyTwelve than it was with TwentyEleven, which I never actually used as I didn’t like some of it’s features.  I stuck with TwentyTen until now.

One thing that is not so great about TwentyTwelve out of the box is it does not support IE8 and below very well.  IE8 is still quite high in the analytics numbers I’m seeing on the sites I support so I can’t justify dropping support for it yet, even though it’s rumoured that some of the biggies like Google will be in the next couple of months.

As I plan to use TwentyTwelve for as a parent for sites I build that are not full custom, I’ve created a base child theme to set-up some the things in TwentyTwelve the way I like them and I’ve shored up the IE8 support with some .js shims for HTML5 and CSS3 support.  (I may post about the IE8 fixes in the future)

I’m headed back to Toronto in November as a presenter at the first ever Toronto WordCamp Developers!

I’ll be talking about 2 somewhat related topics that come up quite often at the Ottawa WordPress Meetup: setting up development sites and migrating sites that have been developed into place on the production server.

http://2012.torontodev.wordcamp.org/session/simple-wordpress-development-sites-and-site-migration/

Today I released my first plugin, a widget to display a Meetup badge and a link to a Meetup Group. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/r3df-meetup-widget/

I built the first version of it earlier in the year to use on the Ottawa WordPress Group website to link to the Meetup website.

In preparation for my one of my WordCamp Toronto 2012 talks I realized it was a simple plugin that would be a good example for the Intro to Plugin development talk.  To release it I had to polish it up a bit for public consumption.

That involved:

• Adding an options interface so that you could set the Meetup group url and name, which up until now had been hard coded.
• Creating a readme for release on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.
• Creating screen shots and a header image for the repository.
• Tidying up the code.
• Adding an uninstall routine to remove settings.

I have a few more plugins I plan to release, but they are also not yet in a publicly consumable state and will need some clean up before I can release them.

I’m excited to be speaking again at WordCamp Toronto 2012 in September.

I’ll be giving 2 presentations:

• A talk about backups for your WordPress site: http://2012.toronto.wordcamp.org/session/you-have-a-backup-dont-you/
• An introduction to WordPress plugin development: http://2012.toronto.wordcamp.org/session/intro-to-wordpress-plugin-development/

If you have not been to a WordCamp, WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences focusing on everything related to WordPress. Each WordCamp is a little different, but they all share a similar goal: provide an opportunity for people to come together and discuss their common interest in WordPress, learn from each other, network, and have a great time doing it.

Woot! Just found out I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Montreal in August.

My talk:

Getting WordPress to speak your language.

An in-depth look at creating WordPress sites in a language other than English, and/or with multiple languages. We will: set up a WordPress site that is not English, see what is needed in themes and plugins to use them in other languages, and learn how to create translations for themes and plugins. We will then review the different strategies and options for creating multilingual sites, from simple sites with custom themes, to multilingual plugins and multisite installs, and the issues related to each approach.

This talk should be informative for WordPress users of any skill level. To get the most from the talk, experience with changing settings, installing plugins, FTP/uploading files to your WordPress install, and editing configuration files would be an asset, but is not required.

Hope to see you there!

I recently attended the Montreal WordPress Meetup “Hello World!” Event to see what other people have been using for creating Multilingual WordPress sites, as my primary multilingual plugin, qTranslate seems to be nearing end of life.  It’s been problematic enough that I’ve been looking at switching to WMPL and have installed it on this site as a test.  This post is a quick summary of about 2 hours of discussion from that meeting.  A related post series I am publishing How to WordPress: Multilingual Overview has much more detail on the issue of multilingual WordPress sites.

The talk started with methods of creating a multilingual site on a single WordPress install.  Most of the plugins such as qTranslate, and WPML are used on a single install.  Single site installs may mean less maintenance (only one site to update) but they need

Some techniques that work well for small/simple sites were then demonstrated.  By using customized themes which have replicated parts such as the header to have a version for each language, and meta tags, or page templates, the site language can be controlled for a particular page.  There are some simple language switcher plugins/widgets that can be used with this method too.

Brief mention was given to qTranalate, but it was not a popular choice, due partially to it’s decline, but also to the lock-in that occurs when you use it.  QTranslate stores all the language versions of a post in a single post using some tags and then filtering to control what content to display.  This is great from an ease of content management perspective, but it means that a lot of manual editing is needed to change to another plugin, or even just to get all your post content separated into individual posts.  (Which is where I am stuck with a couple of my sites right now)  WPML has recently published a qTranslate clean-up and migration plugin that can help with some of the move.  If you need to disable qTranslate, well, basically you can’t, your site will be a mess.

The next major topic was WPML.  Many people at the meeting suggested that it works reasonably well but it seems to have it’s issues too.  It also has lock-in issues.  WPML and most the other single site multilingual plugins store each language in a separate post, and then add some control logic to manage which posts/pages are available to a viewer of the site  Migrating to another plugin would also need a lot of manual edit/reconstruction, although perhaps not as much as qTranslate.

This issue of lock-in lead to the final topic, using multiple installs and in particular, multisite installs.  Multisite removes most of the multiple install (1 site per language) issue of site maintenance.  This concept has some nice things going for it.  The most popular feature is that in it’s simplest form, you don’t need any plugins, so no lock-in.  If you do use some of the management plugins that are available to assist you with a multilingual mutlisite, your sites will still all run even if you disable the plugins as most of their features are only in the dashboard.  The only thing you may loose on the front-end is the language switcher.

I’m going to test out the multisite concept before going any further with WPML.

On November 5th, 2011 I gave my first WordCamp presentation at WordCamp Toronto.

While I have presented many times in the past to large groups, about 575 people was one of the largest, I had not spoken in front of more than 10-20 people for at least 6 years, so I was a bit nervous about it at first.

In the weeks before WordCamp I spent a lot of time developing the presentation and preparing slides. As usual, I learned some things I did not know as I confirmed details for the presentation. I’ve always found I learn when I am teaching, either from the preparation of content, or from the students or student questions at the presentation.

The first event for me was the speakers dinner on Friday night before WordCamp.  A great time was had meeting the other presenters and talking WordPress and a multitude of other things. (Oh, and the dinner was good too  😎 )

Next up was my presentation “Don’t: Just past this code in your functions.php” on Saturday morning. Because of the great supportive environment that seems to be prevalent at WordCamps, I was actually more relaxed by the time I was due to present on Saturday morning than I had been the entire week coming up to it.

I spent the rest of Saturday taking in the other presentations.  Saturday evening there was a social event where I met a lot more people who really know a lot about WordPress.  I also picked the brains of the Toronto WordPress Meetup organizers (Who also ran the WordCamp) to see if there were ideas and practices that could be used to ramp up the Ottawa WordPress Meetup group faster.

Sunday was a bit more relaxed with workshops.  I had planned to work on finalizing my slides for posting to slideshare during the first workshop  “WP Sandbox: Running WordPress on Your Local Machine”, but Alfred, who found out on Saturday that I also use XAMPP, asked me to join the workshop to help people install XAMPP.  It was great to help people out and I again learned a few things that have changed how I have done some of my presentations since then.

I had a great time at WordCamp and now that I have this first presentation out of the way, I am looking forward to speaking at the next WordCamp Toronto, and possibly Montreal too.

On September 21st, 2011 we held the kick-off meeting for the new Ottawa WordPress Group.  R-Cubed is one of the group sponsors and Rick Radko is a co-organizer.

We hope to create a user group that will support leaning and promote WordPress in Ottawa.  The group is to address the needs of all levels of WordPress user from beginner to expert.  All types of users are expected form bloggers to plugin developers.

“The Ottawa WordPress Group is all about learning WordPress, for beginners and experts alike!

Do you want to learn about WordPress?  Do you have a WordPress blog or site, or use WordPress at work? Would you like to talk to others about WordPress?  Do you need to know more about how to run your site?

Attend our next meeting and meet other WordPress users, learn more about WordPress, learn best practices, share ideas, projects and other information.” – The Ottawa WordPress Group

You can join the group by joining our meetup group, additional resources can also be found at our website wpottawa.org.

Hope to see you at our next meeting.