So how is the new WordPress MU 2.7, the new user interface, and functionality? Well so far, it’s excellent. Read on to hear more about my thoughts on the new WPMU 2.7.

New Changes

Completely new user interface back-end. With the introduction of WordPress 2.5/WPMU 2.5, the administration user interface was quite different. It was the “prettiest” to date, easier to use, designed in some part by Happy Cog Studios (more background here), but cumbersome to navigate when trying close comments, change the post date/time, or change authors. Now with the new WP/WPMU 2.7, the admin back-end has changed yet again; for the better this time. What the 2.5 admin back-end did was to refocus on people who write rather than developers as a majority of WordPress users are not always developers. The 2.7 admin back-end does a very good job of organizing all the important “writing” tools within reach and in sensible locations. I find people who use the new 2.7 back-end spend less time looking for things such as how to change a published post back to a draft, future posting, and so forth. Things are much easier to find and use now, although it will take a bit of time getting use to Design is now Appearance and a few other things have been moved around.

Viper007Bond’s Admin Bar Plugin. I’ve used Viper007Bond’s Admin Bar plugin (download from WordPress Plugin Directory) for quite a while now and have it deployed on my office’s WPMU intranet to much rave reviews. I’m particularly excited to find that as of WPMU 2.7, it is now included into the WP core! Congrats Viper! The Admin Bar is great because it gives users a single point of access through drop down menus on the front-end to all of the back-end admin tasks such as posting, comment moderation, and so forth. User of WP 2.7 will still have to download and activate the Admin Bar as a plugin, whereas WPMU 2.7 users will have it built-in, but disabled on the front page by default. To turn it on for the front-end, login and go to Settings > Admin Bar and under Show the admin menu bar, check the box for On the site. If it doesn’t appear on your front page, most likely the theme you are using is missing wp_head() and wp_footer() template tags (directions here and here). Also if you are running WPMU pre-2.7, I highly suggest removing the Admin Bar plugin before upgrading or you will get the dreaded “already defined” php error.

Comments: Reply, Threading, and Pagination. WP/WPMU 2.7 also opens up a host of new template tags, one of which is really exciting is the new functionality for comments. No longer is there a need to use plugins (you still could I guess) such as WP Comment Remix (a great plugin BTW), Brian’s Threaded Comments, and/or WordPress Paged Comments as WP/WPMU 2.7 has all that functionality built-in. Although it’s worth noting that built-in WP/WPMU features such as these tend to be conversative and not have as many customization options so be expecting more plugins like Lester Chan’s WP-CommentNavi that take the existing and expands it with more options. To take full advantage of the new comment system, you will have to make some changes to your theme(s). Directions on how to do that can be found at the WordPress Codex. I look forward to incorporating these new features into my theme, just not sure when I’ll be able to do so.

Automatic Plugin Upgrades, kind of. Another cool new feature of WP/WPMU 2.7 is the inclusion of searching for new plugins from the WP/WPMU back-end as opposed to visiting the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can also install or upgrade plugins found in the Plugin Directory directly to your WordPress install with the new One-click plugin install feature. I haven’t been able to get it properly working for reasons unknown at the moment, and continue to rely on an FTP program to install and upgrade my plugins. I do have it working on my office’s WPMU intranet though.

Media Uploader Works With Flash 10. It was quite annoying when Adobe released Flash 10 and made some security changes that affected SWFUpload (read more here) because it rendered the WordPress media flash uploader unusable in that when you pressed the Select Files, nothing would happen. Fortunately WordPress 2.7 fixes that issue and now we’re back in business!

There are a host of other features that I won’t spend time discussing, but if you are interested, you can read the entire WP/WPMU 2.7 feature list to see other new included features such as the Sticky Post feature.

Conclusion

WordPress MU 2.7 represents how far WPMU and WordPress have come. WordPress usage is growing and is being used by major outlets such as CNN, Time, Ford, and so forth for their blogging software (read the USAToday interview of WordPress co-creator and Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg here).

With the new 2.7 administration panel and features, WordPress is demonstrating how Open Source can be a workable and thriving model.

As an aside, for those who are using Donncha’s wonderful Domain Mapping plugin, there is a new update that addresses one of the biggest flaws (link to the updated files in the comments). It’s worth noting that the problem still exist, but only affects those using the Flash Uploader. So the good news is that you can now finally upload images to a domain mapped subdomain, but the bad news is that it only works with the file browser uploader.

The problems that I have noticed with the plugin, so far, when used with WPMU 2.6.2 is that:

• When you write a post and upload a picture via the Media uploader, the image uploads fine, but when you try to embed an image into the post: the Media uploader frame goes blank and the image is not embedded in FireFox and Safari; or you get a host of security error messages and permission denied in Internet Explorer and then you get the login screen.
• In the Write Post screen, when you try to “Add New Category” and click Add, the new category is not created.
• The Flash Uploader reverts to the browser uploader (uploading multiple files vs single files) for the first picture uploaded, but changes to the Flash uploader afterward.
• You will sometimes get a funky error when trying to activate/deactivate multiple plugins simultaneously.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think with WPMU version 2.6.1 and previous, the Domain Mapping plugin worked completely, but since upgrading to WPMU 2.6.2, it’s been a bit off.

From what I can tell, it has something to do with authentication. For example, http://buiphotography.com is mapped to http://buiphotography.bui4ever.com. Based on what Donncha designed the Domain Mapping plugin to do:

The domain mapping is for blogs only, not sites. The domain mapping hack always annoyed me because it mixed the two concepts up so much. Donncha

What that means is that http://buiphotography.bui4ever.com is the actual site. When you domain map http://buiphotography.com, both the URLS continue to work on the back-end (WordPress Dashboard/Administration Panel), but anyone visiting http://buiphotography.bui4ever.com, the URL will rewrite to http://buiphotography.com.

I think the problem lies in that you if you login via http://buiphotography.com/wp-admin/, the cookies do not populate to http://buiphotography.bui4ever.com. Some where there is where the media uploader is not getting the correct permissions. So I’m not sure if this problem existed before WPMU 2.6.2 or after.

There is one solution, but I personally (and I imagine Donncha) don’t find this the best solution, but it works. Andrea R. suggested editing all the blog fields from http://subdomain.domain.tld/ to http://domain.tld/.

UPDATE: All the sites are now upgraded and running WordPress Multi-User 2.6.2.

So how good is this new plugin? It’s damn good. It simplifies a process that used to take no less than 30+ steps to accomplish! The plugin does not render the XML-RPC useless unlike the old hack did! It was definitely not plug-n-play, or even pretty for that matter. So here’s a step-by-step setup for those who don’t quite know how to use the new plugin.

How Do I Install The Domain Mapping Plugin?

1. Login into the domain name’s control panel (this is different than your website’s cpanel) and change the DNS to reflect your name servers of our server. In my case, it would be

   NS1.bui4ever.com
   NS2.bui4ever.com

   Please note that if this is an existing domain, it may take 24-72 hours for the DNS to propagate. If it’s a new domain name that you just purchased, it will happen very quickly.

2. Download the Domain Mapping plugin from the WordPress Plugins Directory.
3. Unzip the file and upload the sunrise.php file to the /wp-content/ folder. Copy domain_mapping.php into the /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder.
4. Open your wp-config.php file and look for

   // uncomment this to enable wp-content/sunrise.php support
   ;define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );

   and remove the “;” at the very beginning of define to uncomment the code. If you do not see the line of code in your wp-config.php, it’s OK, just write it in right under

   define ('WPLANG','');

   and save it.

5. Please note, you have to have Site Admin privileges to use this plugin. Now in most cases, it makes no sense to domain map a domain.tld blog (your main blog) unless you want to change the domain name. The beauty of this plugin is that if you domain map a domain.tld blog, it will redirect traffic automatically with the new mapped domain name in the URL. To domain map an already created (or a domain.tld blog), go to your Dashboard of the blog that you want to domain map (don’t visit the domain.tld when you are intending to map subdomain.domain.tld), select Tools, and select Domain Mapping.
6. Where it says Server IP Address, you want to enter your the IP address of your server. You can find this out by opening a command prompt (Windows) or a terminal (Mac & Linux) and typing

   ping bui4ever.com

   That will produce the IP address. Enter that IP address and click Save. Under Add new domain, put in the domain name that you wish to be mapped to this blog. Click Add. (If you read the notes underneath the Add new domain, you’ll see that you can do what CNN does with their blogs like the Political Ticker. By using CNAME, WordPress.com is able to host http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/ and CNN would host CNN.com. If you want to do something like that, login in to your domain name that you want to create a virtual subdomain (physical subdomains would be created in your CPANEL which would result in a physical directory on your server whereas a virtual subdomain is merely an aliases) at GoDaddy, Yahoo, or wherever your domain name registar is. I use GoDaddy, so your steps may vary, but I go to my Domain Manager, selct the domain name I wish to add a CNAME to (let’s say in this case, BuiPhotography.com) and click on it to edit. Inside in the middle upper column, under Total DNS, I click Total DNS Control and MX Records. Under CNAMES (Aliases), I click Add New CNAME Record. Under Enter Alias Name, I put blog in the field because that’s the new virtual subdomain I wish to create. Under Points To Host Name:, I put in the server IP address of my server that hosts the WPMU installation where my blog resides. Leave TTL to an hour. It may take anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 days to resolve before you can use the newly created virtual subdomain. Once it does resolve, you need to login into your CPANEL and park the subdomain (blog.buiphotography.com). Once parked, now login into your blog you wish to domain map (http://buiphotography.bui4ever.com) and go to Tools > Domain Mapping and enter in blog.buiphotography.com and it should start working! Cool huh?

7. After you save, you will notice that the new URL is resolving with the new domain mapping meaning that subdomain.domain.tld should now resolve as domain.tld and if you try to visit subdomain.domain.tld, it should automatically rewrite it as domain.tld.
8. If you wish to undo the process, log back into the Dashboard > Manage > Domain Mapping and delete the entry.

Absolutely amazing.

[UPDATE: So one of the major things I noticed is that with the Domain Mapping plugin, you can no longer create subdomain blogs of mapped domains. With Dr. Mike's domain mapping method, a newly mapped domain had the ability to create subdomain.domain.tld just like the main site. For some people, this could be a drawback and for others, it doesn't matter, but it's worth noting.]