shared forum for multiple sites

[waffen]

I’m working on a network of sites, each running on their respective domain, and i’d like the sites to have a common user database. In other words, the users should be able to comment articles and post in the forum without registering multiple times.

One of the approaches i’m considering is to have a standalone forum (like SMF or phpBB based) and integrate the WP instances through a bridge. The other one is this new multisite feature (that i’m totally unfamiliar with), i suppose it’d allow me to use an integrated forum plugin like simplepress that would be available for users registered to any of the sites. The only downside might be that as i read somewhere MU requires a whole lot of resources, it won’t even run smoothly on a shared hosting and needs a VPS.

I’d highly appreciate any advice.

[Douglas Bell]

I’ll get to the easier part: WordPress Multi-Site doesn’t require a VPS unless you’re intending to scale it for hundreds or thousands of blogs. It’s just like any other website–the more stuff you have on it, the more it’s going to eat up your bandwidth, execute lots of queries to the database, etc. The point when you’re starting to hog too much resources from the shared server is the point when you’d need a VPS.

However I use WP Multi-Site on a shared hosting account with no problems, considering that I’m only running a few dozen small blogs on my network. However if you’re going to run WordPress multi-site with subdomains (blog.example.com), you’re going to need to make sure that your host will let your create a “virtual subdomain.” In cPanel, this is the equivalent of creating a subdomain *.example.com and having it direct to the root of your hosting account. Not all shared hosts allow this specifically because they’re scared of the possible weight of WP Multi-Site, but a number should allow it just fine.

You might consider BuddyPress (www.buddypress.org) which integrates a wide variety of social features–including a bbPress forum–in with WordPress (in both the standalone and multi-site flavors).

[Andrea Rennick]

In other words, the users should be able to comment articles and post in the forum without registering multiple times.

that’s what the network does by default. You know how it works at wordpress.com? ??

The only downside might be that as i read somewhere MU requires a whole lot of resources, it won’t even run smoothly on a shared hosting and needs a VPS.

Again, it depends. Got a lot of users & traffic? Then yeah, VPS time.

[waffen]

Guys, thanks for your help. In the meantime i’ve found Buddypress. I’m just getting familiar with it. To be honest i don’t have the faintest clue how wordpress.com works but afaik it’s MU-based. The thing is that i’d like my sites to run under different domains not just subdomains. My hosting provider (siteground) allows me to add subdomains but it’s not exactly what i want. As i learnt the current version of WP3 doesn’t support multi-sites running on separate domains, only subdomains. There’s some plugin that does that though, i haven’t tried it yet.

[Andrea Rennick]

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/

??

It works.

the site linked to on my profile is a domain mapped site in a network setup.

[heronakamura]

Hiya Andrea, I’m wondering if you can help clear this question for me. I found this thread and I thought I’ll ressurect this as it seems to in the same direction as my question.

You mentioned about the multisites somewhat similar to how wordpress.com works. Here’s my question:

What I want to happen is to have users who registered to be automatically be contributor on each of my multi sites. Is this possible? Saves them from registering on each of my sub-blogs.

[Andrea Rennick]

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/subdirectory-multi-site-single-registration-as-contributors-to-all-the-sites

[heronakamura]

Many Thanks andrea