Pat’s Point of View

If only for my own sanity should I ever want to do this again, here are some useful tips for installing WordPress MU into a subdirectory on a webserver that already has a normal version of WordPress installed in the root. If that makes no sense to you then don’t worry, you probably don’t need to know:

1. Download ZIP file and unzip files into the subdirectory (eg “/mu/”)
2. Open “/mu/wp-blog-header.php”
3. Locate line 9: if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php')
&& !file_exists( dirname( dirname(__FILE__) ) . '/wp-config.php')) {
4. Edit this line to be: if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php') ) {
5. Continue normal installation by going to “/mu/index.php”

The reason for this? If the MU installer detects the wp-config.php file in the root directory it thinks it’s already installed, but it isn’t. What it’s finding is the wp-config.php for the existing single-user version of WordPress.

There you go.

I spent today at Ark Group’s Strategically Managing Intranet Developments conference, which I blogged about before.

There were some good things being said, and by real people who have done the hard yards. They’re not “industry luminaries”, but people out there in the trenches working out how to create effective intranets. Grounded and real are two words I would apply to the conference.

Then there was my presentation, a tad more abstract, but I felt it went well. Slides below.

I felt compelled to steer my presentation towards audience participation, if only because of the collective knowledge in the room; about half the room were presenting at the conference so I was learning as much, if not more, than I was dishing out. That’s the downside of being a consultant, you rarely get that rich experience that in-house staff have. Some great examples were offered by the audience, complementing my own examples.

There were one or two people twittering, you can follow the conversation on #smid.

Happy to hear your comments on my slides, either here or on slidehsare.