I’ve been a big proponent of Wordpress over the past 6 months, using it to support the vast majority of websites/domains I own that aren’t forum based.  For those, I use vBulletin.  But for a recent project I’m now developing, I couldn’t get my arms around a logical setup.  I tried to map it out time and time again to exist with a single wordpress installation… it simply wouldn’t work well enough.

Son of a gun… what do I do now?  I have about 30 sub-niches that each need their own “interface” and can’t merely be given a “category” or “page  nest”.  Would I have to create a folder for each under my main domain name and conduct a seperate wordpress installation for each?  Not a chance, thanks to Wordpress MU.  The MU stands for Multi-User and let me tell you, this thing works like magic.

I followed a few simple commands, asked my web host to change a CHMOD setting and bang, I’m up and running.  The Wordpress MU interface is virtually the EXACT same interface as a single wordpress installation.  The only difference is, there is a new tab called “Site Admin” where you can add blogs with the click of a button (no cpanel needed), add users on the fly,  activate plugins and themes sitewide or choose individual settings on each blog.  Really, really fabulous CMS.

Here is an example of a GREAT use for Wordpress MU.  You want to create a blog network for major league baseball teams.  So, you register a domain like BaseballCoolio.com.  You install wordpress MU into the root directory and use the one click blog creation to create a seperate blog for each team.  Within a matter of about 10 minutes you’ll have a seperate blog for every single MLB team with names such as RedSox.BaseballCoolio.com.  Alternatively, you could have them setup as www.baseballcoolio.com/redsox.  It’s all a matter of preference.

One thing I will say, however, is that Eli at BlueHatSEO, among others, has stated that sub domains are treated by search engines as their own entity.  So personally, I would prefer making a subdomain for each account whereby Wordpress MU has essentially allowed me to create a “network” of 32 interlinking websites.  Unfortunately, my main website is a forum and upon asking for help in the Wordpress Forums I was told it is impossible to setup something like Keyword.DomainName.Com using Wordpress MU if I don’t install MU in my root directory.  I have vB installed in my root directory so instead, I have my domain setup as something like Blog.MyDomain.com/Keyword… much better than the alternative of Keyword.Blog.MyDomain.Com which just seems and looks stupid.

In any case, if you’ve got a big idea that has lots of different angles and subjects and you’re head is about to explode thinking about the organizational structure of your blog/site – I would definitely recommend giving Wordpress MU a closer look.