As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working with a non-profit organization (“Organization”) to develop and implement a platform for their members that will make it easier for them to organize, coordinate, and communicate with each other and have chosen to implement a WordPressMU (WPMU) + BuddyPress + bbPress solution. Now that I’m a couple of weeks in, I wanted to share some of the challenges I’ve encountered so far and a few of the solutions.
Hosting and Setup
Good grief. I thought trying to find a host for a general site (WordPress or not) was a pain. Lots of “BUY NOW! BUY NOW!” combined with a mix of technical jargon, “special offers”, and various price points, is often confusing and almost never fun.
But, as annoying as searching for a “vanilla” host may be, at least you know there are plenty of options out there. Finding and selecting a WPMU host was much harder!
Here’s what I discovered:
- Many of the organizations that run WPMU are quite large (universities, large companies, WordPress itself) and have significant technical staff. This often means that they can either host their own WPMU installation or can justify paying for a custom solution.
- Most “vanilla” hosting plans are for shared hosting services, but due to the potential size/resource impact of a WPMU install, many of these hosts will either prohibit installing WPMU or will require it to be installed on a dedicated host. Not surprisingly, dedicated hosting is significantly more expensive than shared.
- Most “vanilla” hosting plans include one-click installation of many common software packages (including WordPress), and once you’ve done the installation, you’re ready to get up and running. Getting WPMU + BuddyPress + bbPress is never one-click. It’s not terribly difficult, but it does take a little more elbow grease than a single WP install.
With all that in mind, I was glad to finally find a setup + hosting package that wouldn’t break the bank or cause me to rip out all of my hair.
Audience + Content + Features
Ok, I have my host in place and everything’s been installed… Now what?
I started by classifying the people who would be using the site into three different audiences:
- Members of the Organization. This includes all categories of Organization members and also includes the Organization’s paid staff.
- Partners of the Organization. These are people, other organizations, and companies who are formally involved with the Organization in some way – through community outreach, fundraising, etc.
- Everyone else.
And, by classifying the site’s content into three categories:
- Private. Only authorized users (who are Members of the Organization) can see/edit.
- Semi-private. Members and Partners can see. Only authorized users can edit.
- Public. Anyone can see, only authorized users can edit.
And, then I added in the primary features I’ll be focusing on:
- Main Blog.When you go to the primary domain, the Main Blog is the first thing you see. This blog will contain announcements of interest to all Members, but nothing that should be kept from Partners or the public.
- Groups/Messaging.The BuddyPress “group” functionality will allow all Members to create groups with as much or as little privacy as needed. For example, we may have a public group containing a calendar of all events available to the public and a private group for staff or a subset of Members. The “private message” functionality will allow registered users to communicate directly through the site.
So, once you put it all together, it looks a little something like this:
Next time, I’ll focus on some of the behind-the-scenes Site Admin tasks needed to get everything working smoothly. Until then, let me know your thoughts on WPMU. Have you considered it for your organization?
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