With day-by-day WordPress making its place among more and more users, it’s now being considered as a powerful and a flexible platform. It’s not only one or two things that make WordPress – the BEST – content management system for all – but also for the way it has entered and keep on bringing a huge decency in life for all those connected with the web.

Subdomain

This is not only that completed WordPress but there is a more powerful mode that the platform that WordPress includes, dubbed as Multisite. Multisite means a way by which you can turn your single WordPress installation into a network of sites, likely to even hundreds or thousands of sites. Reuters, BBC America, both run on Multisite.

Introduction

It may sounds like a lull that Multisite is not something that everyone required, but what if you require a bigger place to showcase your work – then would be either anything like collection of images, videos, content – at that time the single WordPress installation not works well for you. As stated above, Multisite is a way – a feature – by which you can run number of sites from your one single WordPress installation only. All the sites shares the same plugins as well as the themes and over the top, the single database, although they do come up with different tables within the database plus they all have their own media uploads directories.

Why I Require A Multisite?

The most common reason to go for Multisite is that it allows users to create a new site automatically with no extra efforts to put in from the administration side although the new site will be placed at different URLs – can be either a subdomain or a page inside the main domain.

Is It Really For Me?

The answer is simple, if you want to ease your job, want better authority and want all the things at one place, then Multisite will be your lifeline. The things which make you select Multisite includes, if in case you want different themes on one single site, different plugins/functionality for different part of your site, different admin/editors access for different sections.

Advantages

  • Automatic site/blog creation for any user
  • Automatic blog creation for a limited set of users
  • Unlimited site-creation for one user
  • Limit the site creation for one user
  • Limit the amount of uploads
  • Different themes on different parts of your site
  • Changes to one theme will apply the change to the theme on all the sites that use it
  • Users can create and manage multiple sites
  • Sites can be completely separate from each other
  • Sites can be integrated in a number of ways
  • Activate different themes on site-on-site basis

Disadvantages

  • Running a Multisite network means the admin do have good knowledge on how to manage the whole of network
  • You know how to edit core WordPress files
  • You need access to your server
  • Some themes and plugins don’t come compatible with Multisite
  • If your one site gets hacked or you got a problem with your core installation, then it will affect the whole of your network
  • It creates a problem sometimes on making the connection between content from various sites onto the main homepage

Useful Resources

Create A Network

Migrating Multiple Blogs into WordPress 3.0 Multisite

Multisite Plugins

Questions on Multisite

WordPress Multisite Showcase

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