Question for people managing 10+ WordPress instals? How are you upgrading those?

CMS & WordPress
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to gather some info for a startup we are working on! The first is a pool as we are really curious to see how many people are managing a lot of WordPress sites.

And 2, I was hoping to share how you are currently keeping those all upgraded? Are you manually doing each one? Using a plugin or what?

Thanks!

2

Only one.

I don’t use the “auto-update” feature because I have a few core files with custom hacks.

3

I actively maintain three, but help out on two more on an as-needed basis.

On all of them, I simply use the auto-update feature. Anything that gets highly customized either happens in a plugin or happens in the template. No core hacks, simply because then you run into the problem that Mittineague faces with every upgrade.

I also have a few sandbox environments for testing plugin compatibility before upgrading on the live site.

4

Gotcha, have you ever had any problems with security cause of that? What are the hacks doing to core btw? Just something a plugin couldn’t do?

Thanks, Ben

5

I’ve just been too lazy busy to write plugins to do the stuff. By now there’s a good chance someone else has already written them.

Nothing too major, adding a couple custom smilies, extra admin form fields, luckily most of my “added security” hacks have become obsolete though I still have one of those that I’m pretty sure there is a plugin for now if I ever get around to looking for it.

6

wordpress.com maintains one wordpress blog per server (with thousands of separate domains on each).

If I had more than two wordpress blogs I’d convert them to use just one copy of the script and sop be able to update all 3 or 3000 of them with one press of the update button. All it needs is for you to enable the multisite option in the config file.

7

More Info: Create A Network « WordPress Codex

8

all time i try to auto update . if face any problem then update it manually .

9

I wouldn’t recommend doing that, it creates a massive scaling problem later on. It is way easier if you have separate installs to scale, if you have MU you have to eventually move to having a database server + frontend boxes and a level of complexity that cost more too. Easier to stick with VPSes that can scale as needed for small groups of individual sites.

Thanks, Ben

10

then you are running an old version of WordPressMU as it was renamed multisite and incorporated into WordPress itself several versions back. MU itself is no longer supported.

Also there’s nothing to stop you from continuing to use VPS or whatever. Obviously you would use one WordPress install per hosting account.

Provided it is set up the right way you could still move individual blogs between hosting accounts as needed.

So the only time you’d have 10 WordPress installs that all need updating is if you have ten separate hosting accounts full of WordPress blogs.

11

Yep I’m familiar, I meant multi site, can you please point me to how you setup multi site across multiple hosting accounts on the net?

When I set it up and played with it when it first came out it didn’t have anything like that? In my reading I haven’t seen how that is possible so please let me know?

Thanks, Ben

12

I’ve recently starting using https://managewp.com/ it’s pretty rocking. I’ve got about 20 sites in there, it sends me emails that summarise all of the plugins that have updates, I think it provides a facility to upgrade them all via the interface (Haven’t got there yet). It also allows me to back up all of my sites to dropbox or Amazon S3 which is pretty damn cool.