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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:

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. Install the LAMP stack. There's a good article on how to do this here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP
  4. Install WordPress. Here's a good article on doing that: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-14-04
  5. Set up WordPress multisite: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
  6. 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/
  7. Now you can create users and sites.

Update: The students made some cool sites! Here are a couple of my favorites:
http://students.woodland-school.org/samantha/
http://students.woodland-school.org/madison/

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