For me, I’ve come to terms that it’s much more fun to play with my blogs than it is to actually blog. I like the process of writing, but I don’t care much for the editing to get things ready for the final draft, especially when pressed for time get back to the real world. I like tweaking the blog, but am much less interested in promoting it. This brings up the question, “Why blog?” Well, ‘cuz it’s fun. And when it’s not fun, but a job or a chore, it’s hard justifying working on it when there is real work to do.
Even though it doesn’t really show much in terms of new entries, I have actually been spending a little free time on the blog and it’s been challenging learning how to deal with self-hosting, but (most importantly) fun. One new thing I decided to try was to step up a test blog so that I could tweak to my hearts content without taking down the entire blog. If I’ve learned anything in the last two months is that me + free time = demolished website. Not pretty.
To set up multiple blogs for one user, I can recommend the plug-in WP Hive. The idea behind the hive is that you can have multiple blogs that use the same install. The blogs don’t have to have identical features, but if you’ve installed a theme or plug-in for one blog, it is available to the others. In theory you also don’t need to no much about code or programming to get the plug-in to work. It certainly seemed efficient and time-saving to me, which is always a boon. Most of the other options suggested by Wordpress seemed much grander than what I needed or way past the expiry date or more work than I was looking for. Those it didn’t offer the quick switching an one time login of WP.com which all the other features, WP Hive seemed like a clear winner.
My recommendation is not a wholehearted recommendation though. I did mention that in theory you really shouldn’t have to break into the the files and find your inner programmer, right? While the instructions for installation are certainly correct and straightforward, they are as one frustrated user described, quite sparse. In order to get it to work I actually had to do what I’d hope to avoid, install a whole new test blog so I could figure out want went wrong without completely exploding what I already had set up. That kind of defeated the point of why I needed the hive, but I figured if I wound up needing another blog beyond the test blog it would be worth it with my penchant for trying new plug-ins.
If you understand the vague language of the instructions, understand the ins and outs of general blog installation and manipulation, and follow the directions without deviation should probably get through the install without much incident. It’ll probably help if you have a similar host as the plug-ins author. He mentions one of his hosts is Bluehost, although a user had problems with that too. This of course didn’t work for me. I had actually signed up for his forum to ask my questions directly but was a bit disconcerted at the relatively large number of questions that went without a response, or where the poster wound up solving their own problem anyway. The author has offered a really nifty free plug-in but the hand-holding isn’t exactly part of the package. While I can completely appreciate that, as I don’t like to work for free either, it didn’t help my problems much.
If you are just competent enough with self-install to be dangerous like me and decide to brave the waters and install the HIve, I can offer a few words of advice.
1.) Follow the steps of the install as closely as possible. Once you get what’s happening, it’s not so important, but if things don’t go according to plan, it’ll make it that much easier to isolate where the issue is.
2.) Read the whole forum. The answers to what you need might not be phrased the way you think it would be but the answer is probably there. The install really is fairly simple, again you just may need a few things spelled out.
3.) A lot of people had problems setting up the sub domain. This was actually fairly clear to me, as I’d done it before. To things it might help to remember: you are not redirecting the site to a new address. You are making one or more subdomains, and pointing it/them to the folder on your server where you installed the wordpress software. In my case it was a folder called domainname/blog, but it can vary. Just remember it’s the folder that you used for the main install.
4.) The database referred to is the MySQL database. I went though every file via ftp looking for the “database”, the two files referred to in the troubleshooting (one was wphive_hosts, I forget the other), and these tables people kept referring to, before I realized I have to use my host’s MySQL management software to edit the MySQL and that the “tables” were a list of files that created the posts and other content. Yes it’s pretty basic, but when I was in school, blogs didn’t exist and I don’t plan on making it an area of study any more than I need to. When I finally figured that out I was able to solve my main problem, which was one of the seemingly most simple steps, “loading” my original blog or simply just reloading the page, since I had it up. Everytime I tried, it insisted on installing a fresh blog instead of seeing this one. It turns out that this forum thread described my issue. The guy with the problem took a longer way around and renamed everyone of his tables. The author recommends updating “the table ‘wphive_hosts’ and set the ‘prefix’ for your primary domain to the same value that is defined for the prefix in the main wp-config.php file.” For whatever reason that wasn’t working for me and I found it simplest and quickest to edit the do-prefix.php file in the WPhive plugin folder. There is a line that defines the prefix as being six (6) characters. Changing the length to 10 kept it from chopping up the prefix in my tables and assuming that this meant I needed a fresh blog install. If this does happen to you, you have to erase the new tables that are accidently created. I figured this out by opening the files just to be sure, but by eye, it’ll be the files with the truncated prefix.
5.) Finally, if you find that the front page of your blog is fine, but none of the links work, you probably need to refresh and reset your permalinks under settings in your Wordpress dashboard. It reverts to the default everytime you add a blog. Someone came up with a quick fix for this so you don’t have to reset you all of your blogs everytime, but since I only have three, I admit, I didn’t bookmark the page in the forums that had this trick. It’s one of the issues with the most responses though, so it’s easy to look up if you find yourself with this problem.
6.) Finally don’t panic if things go unexpectedly. Installing the plugin doesn’t overwrite anything you have and if you move, delete or rename the db.php file chances are you can always get back to normal with a simple uninstall and a few more deleted files. Don’t go doing anything drastic and you should be fine. Also take comfort in the number of people who seemed to be able to install the plugin with no hitches at all. Once you have a successful install you’ll look back and it’ll all make perfect sense in hindsight. Ain’t that always the way?
And hey, I got to blog about it too. That’s what I call progress.
