If there is something most obvious among the web developers and designers, it is the fact that WordPress is conquering the web at an unrelenting pace. And that’s something easily validated by the statistical piece that suggests that close to 75 million websites on the web depend on WordPress in some capacity. Thew Internet economy is being overwhelmingly dominated by this highly customizable and unwaveringly powerful content management system.
The staggering popularity of WordPress has further pushed the WordPress developer community to aim for higher grounds and get to there with ease and effect. There is no denying that the competition to WordPress is stronger than ever. You have platforms like Joomla, Drupal and Magento that are very popular, especially among the business owners and online merchants. But in sheer numbers, they are yet to catch up to WordPress.
The success of WordPress can be owed to so many factors, but most to the proactive developers and designers who turn every stone in their strides to perch WordPress up and beyond its closest peers. There more and more reinventions happening every hour. And among the latest goodies that WordPress has swung at us, WordPress Multisites are grabbing headlines.
What is a WordPress Multisite
As is the norm, a tree would offer you not more than one type of fruit. Likewise, there are CMS platforms that allow you to run just a single website from a single installation. WordPress multisite however glides past this constraints and gives you a feature by which you can run more than one websites from just a single backend.
This is among singularly the most amazing features that WordPress tosses at us as it gives us so much more freedom and saves a truckload of time. Every time you install a plugin or theme on one of the websites, it runs seamlessly on other sites on the network too. The cherry on the cake is that you have the control to restrict the access of these plugins for certain users.
The question a number of folks reading this post might ask to themselves is “Have I ever encountered a WordPress multisite?”. If you have not been living under a rock, you most certainly have. WordPress.com is the best example of a WordPress multisite. It is a single domain that lets you append your preferred name as and when you decide to have your personal blog. It is, in its bare bones, a massive network of multisites and you are a part of it if you are running a personal blog on WordPress.com.
Apart from WordPress.com, there are other noteworthy examples of WordPress multisite that include websites lie Edublogs.org and TeachForUs. On these sites, you can have your own subdomain and share your knowledge and opinions.
“Be it As it May, Why Do I Need a WordPress Multisite”
The benefits of WordPress multisites have been reasonably documented by now, and most of it points towards the versatility you inject in your website using this feature.
Your website may be populated with several users and as an admin, it would most certainly be the most arduous job to manage the accounts of each of them. With multisite, you got to do is to aprove the subdomains on your site of the likes of
• myblog.abc.com
• abc.com/myblog
Once that is done, your users have websites of their own and they can tinker around it at their will. They can place the elements like headers, widgets, and other sidebar elements at their preferred position and also can change the backgrounds. They can also install themes of their choice. But anytime you feel someone is crossing the line, you can take the required action. As an admin, you have the admin panel at your mercy and you can use it to manage the site-wide elements.
Also, you have the wherewithal to restrict the number of uploads being made on the site, and this can be done in a fairly easy manner by just making some tweaks in the settings page. But, there are the kind of websites for which multisite won’t be the ideal options. These includes business websites, portfolio blogs, etc.
It can thus be deduced that WordPress Multisite is a worthwhile feature. If you deem your website needs it, now is not the time to wait.
About the Author
Ben Wilson is an experienced developer at WordPrax Ltd. and a professional writer who loves to share useful insights on WordPress development and its widely practiced exercises such as PSD to WordPress Theme conversion and others. So, if you love to hear about new developments and key concepts regarding WordPress CMS, then you can read other useful posts shared by Ben.
