I missed the announcement earlier this year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging. The less well known multi-blog WP MU is my workhorse supporting many websites on one codebase, perfect for developing many domains. BuddyPress, a set of social networking plugins for WP MU that I have used on select domains is also going to become part of this merged community. The combined power of these merged development tools has me salivating. Domain development looks set to become much simpler.
WordPress and WordPress MU merge
Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress announced that WordPress MU would fold into WordPress in the near future. Many people are guessing that WordPress 3.0 will be the first merged version. No details have been unveiled yet.
The advantages of running WP MU are clear to any of you who follow this blog. Trying to develop and manage multiple websites with individual software for each website e.g. WordPress becomes impractical. WP MU allows you to run multiple blogs on one copy of software. It can be adapted to run multiple websites also.
The disadvantage to WP MU has been when you sell a website, you have to port it over to WordPress. Having these projects merge should make this much easier but we will have to see how they implement it.
A bigger community
Donncha O Caoimh has been the main driver behind WP MU and with this project folding into WordPress, the bigger community of developers and users should allow quicker implementation of features and upgrades. Donncha commented on his blog:
“Basically, the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress. I expect the WordPress MU project itself will come to an end because it won’t be needed any more (which saddens me), but on the other hand many more people will be working on that very same MU code which means more features and more bugfixes and faster too. It also means no more marathon code merging sessions. I certainly won’t miss that.”
BuddyPress, a WordPress MU social network
I have previously talked about BuddyPress which was developed by Andy Peatling as a set of plugins for WordPress MU that created a social networking website. Now with the merge, the power of social networking will come to the mainstream WordPress community and we should see that development and implementation will speed up. If you have tried to set up a social network, you probably already know how poor the choice of software is and how much work it takes to make it do what you want to do.
The future is bright
Pulling these development streams together should result in a tool that will benefit domainers building out their domains and decrease the hassle and time it takes to roll out and customize a website.
