Setting up WordPress Multisite for a Student Project
Mar 11, 2015
I was asked by our tech teacher to set up WordPress sites for our 8th Graders to use for a final project. WordPress has a special mode called multisite that makes this fairly simple. With multisite you essentially have a single installation of WordPress but you can create multiple blogs within that single install each of which can have its own admin user, theme, content, etc.
Here is a basic set of steps for accomplishing this task (or how I did it anyway--there are many other possibilities). This process requires some knowledge of Linux server administration and probably some prior experience installing web apps under Apache:
- Set up a new Linode (https://www.linode.com/) and deploy an image to it. I used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I actually tried the WordPress stack script first but I didn't like the way it was set up so I just deployed a basic Ubuntu image. I chose Linode because I really like the management interface and I've found the service to be highly reliable. We run our main school website on Linode as well.
- After setting up the new Linode I created a new A record in our DNS settings (studentblogs.ourdomain.org) pointing to the static IP address of the Linode and then waited a couple of hours for the new record to propagate.
- Install the LAMP stack. There's a good article on how to do this here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP
- Install WordPress. Here's a good article on doing that: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-14-04
- Set up WordPress multisite: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
- After that is done it's a good idea to harden your server to prevent hacking: http://www.lampnode.com/linux/howto-harden-ubuntu-1404-after-installation/
- Now you can create users and sites.
Update: The students made some cool sites! Here are a couple of my favorites:
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