The news first broke back in July, at WordCamp. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress (and parent company Automattic) [Correction. Please see the comments.] told the audience that WordPress (the .org) and WordPress MU would be merging. Until today, though, little else has been heard about it.
In the most recent WordPress Beta announcement, for 3.0 Beta 1, there is a very small note that almost gets lost in the context: “The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard.”
The line goes on to say that there are some instructions to follow in order to access the more in-depth features of Super Admin, but nothing else is noted in the post.
What this means for the rest of us is that we can now run multiple WordPress sites from a single installation, just as users of WordPress MU have been able to do in the past.
The Next Web is a great example of the MU capabilities. Each of our Channels is its own WordPress blog, allowing us to post on any or all of our Channels at any time.
Giving these features to all WordPress users not only hands some massive content creation ability but it also helps to cement WordPress even more firmly into the foundation of blogging.
simplifying is always good.
MU should be improved — This update is just great — Just make sure that you backup all your database/files first before plungin with this. To avoid hiccups.
The bulk of the code merge was done by Ron Rennick (not an Automattic employee). Also, Automattic isn't the parent company of WordPress. WordPress predates Automattic by several years, and there are many companies and individuals who contribute to it (such as me, also not an Automattic employee). WordPress is not owned by any one company — it is a community project!
As for the multiple blogs feature, it's still separated out. So existing WordPress users won't see anything new regarding that. We haven't changed anything about the intended audience for the feature — so multiple sites functionality isn't going to suddenly become more appropriate for you just because you've upgraded to WordPress 3.0. This may change in a future version. For 3.0 we just wanted to get the code merged and a few key features added. We're going to consider larger changes to the multiple sites functionality for future versions.
@Mark- you sound snooty.
Mark is correct. I can't count the number of sites that refer to Automattic (my employer) as the parent company of WordPress. For the record:
-Automattic is the parent company of WordPress.com, a site/business that offers a hassle-free WordPress sites.
-WordPress (no .com on the end) is an open source free software project that lives at WordPress.org. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, is also the co-founder and project lead of WordPress, but Automattic does not own WordPress. As Mark said, the bulk of development is done by volunteers.
Thanks for the clarification, Jane and Mark. There was some editorial confusion there.
Thats becouse he is.
Any suggestions on how to change or upgrade from wordpress to wordpress mu?
Might as well chime in and say someone forgot to capitalize the P in WordPress within the title.
Just sounds like he's tired of people not getting facts correct.
Mark is a good dude. There just persists a lot of confusion about the relationship between Automattic and WordPress. He's just being factual not snooty. This needs to keep getting hammered home until people understand it (though the confusion is understandable too)