Installing WordPress Mu on a Dreamhost Server
November 12, 2009 – 1:14 am |I really wanted to use WordPress Mu for Focus Of The Week, which is a site where I give people blogs and they post on their topic once a week.
WordPress Mu is a multi user platform for WordPress where you can manage multiple blogs from the same administrative area. It is a great tool for managing multiple blogs, and on DreamHost it would be perfect! However, they do not have a way for you to do dynamic DNS unless you are paying extra for DreamHost PS, so there is a little extra work that goes into setting it up.
So how do we do this? Follow these steps and you are on your way:
First, make sure your domain is propagated to your DreamHost server. Second, you need to make sure that WordPress Mu is on the server and installed. You can do this pretty easy with the installation instructions and a little elbow grease if you haven’t done it before. It should not take you longer than 20 minutes, if it does you might want to phone a friend.
Now that Mu is set up, you may have noticed the Blogs administration area under “Site Admin”:
Add a blog to the next page by filling out this form:
Once that is in the system, you will notice if you go to that domain that you cannot see the blog. You still need to set up your DreamHost DNS to know about the domain. The easiest way to do this is through the DreamHost Panel, NOT AT YOUR REGISTRAR. The reason is simple, DreamHost already has the DNS for your main domain, so all requests are going to them, even for subdomains. Also, when you set up the subdomain with them it will propagate so much faster than with your registrar.
You do this through the DreamHost Domain Manager:
Once you submit the domain, you just have to wait a little while. Sometimes it is really fast and sometimes it takes up to a couple hours. What I do is just check the URL in my browser every half hour to an hour.
You can now host a WordPress Mu site on DreamHost!
If you need hosting for a blog site, DreamHost is a pretty good way to do it. For a single blog, they have One-Click-Installs which makes installing regular WordPress a breeze. To get a huge discount, $50 off any normal hosting fees you can use Promo Code: PROJECTLAUNCHER
