WordPress Multisite: A brief analysis
What is WordPress Multisite?
“WordPress Multisite Network” is one of the great features currently WordPress is bundled with which not only saves time for developing the complex coding for a multisite network from scratch but also a great option for economical point of view.
A WordPress multisite network is a collection of sites which share same WordPress installation as well as the same database with different tables.
As these sites share the same WordPress install it is obvious that they can share same WordPress Themes and Plugins with their own individual configurations.
Different options available with multisite
The domain names of the sites in your network can be different according to the requirement.Those names can be
of following types:
-
- Sub-domains
These are the domain names in which on-demand sites use subdomains of the primary domain (Main site).
For example, if your primary domain is thewebfosters.com, in this case, the domain names can be site1.thewebfosters.com, site2.thewebfosters.com etc. - Sub-directories
These are the domain names in which on-demand sites use paths of the primary domain (Main site)
For example, if your primary domain is thewebfosters.com, in this case, the domain names can be thewebfosters.com/site1/, thewebfosters.com/site2 etc. - Different domain
In this case, the domain names need not be related to the primary site.Here the site is created as one of the
above types but later can be mapped to a completely different domain name.
For example, if the primary site is domain1.com other sites can be domain2.com or domain3.com etc.
- Sub-domains
Note: Domain mapping feature was not native to WordPress until the release 4.5. For which a third party plugin called WordPress MU Domain Mapping can be used.
How to enable multisite network in your current WordPress install?
There is already easily understandable documentation available for this. you can check it here,
so I am not discussing it here again.
Some cool features available with a Multisite Network
- Share plugins between blogs
As there is a single WordPress install we can share the same plugin with different blogs in a network.We can enable the plugin for all the blogs by logging in as the network admin and then clicking on “Network Activate” on the plugins page or enable the plugin for some specific blogs by activating the plugin from the respective blog.
- Share Themes between blogs
We can also set the same theme for all blogs in the network or can set different themes as per the requirement. - Share contents between different blogs
We have the option to fully access any blog from anywhere in the network by simply switching to that blog by passing the respective blog id in the following code.
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switch_to_blog( $blog_id ); //Your code restore_current_blog(); |
We can also access all the blogs in the network at once like,
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$sites = wp_get_sites(); foreach( $sites as $site ){ switch_to_blog( $site[ 'blog_id' ] ); //Your code restore_current_blog(); } |
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