[wp-hackers] Network Installation for multisites

[Andrew Nacin]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 7:05 AM, Nikola Nikolov <nikolov.tmw at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm just wildly guessing here, but maybe one of the reasons is because a
> multisite network is more complex than a normal WordPress site - meaning
> that the administrator of a network should have a bit more technical
> knowledge and you would most-likely need FTP access to your site anyway.



Besides you already have to add a line of code to your wp-config.php in
> order to enable network installation, so it's not a big hassle to put the
> lines of code yourself.



Again - that was just a guess, so if anyone has concrete knowledge on the
> matter I'd be very interested in learning about the reasoning.


On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Nikola Nikolov <nikolov.tmw at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'd say that most of the users of WordPress don't really need a multisite
> network - just because it exists doesn't mean that everyone needs it. And
> the philosophy of WordPress regarding options is more or less along the
> lines of "each option that is offered puts the decision on the user - which
> makes it less user-friendly".



So if you want to have a network you will look it up and do it yourself.


On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Eric Hendrix <hendronix at gmail.com> wrote:

> Much of the time, users who think they want a multi-site really aren't sure
> what they're getting into. When you explain the difference between
> "multiple WordPress sites" and "multi-site," many opt to use multiple
> sites.


All of this is accurate.

We didn't need to introduce WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE; we could have edited
wp-config.php for you; we could have made it so multisite didn't require
wp-config.php changes. In fact, we wrote the patches for all of this back
in 3.0 (during the WPMU merge) and decided against them.

WordPress multisite is deliberately a pain to install because it's not for
everyone. We need to make it easier to use and to manage before we make it
easier to install. That especially means eliminating more of the "gotchas"
and quirks, smoothing over the arbitrary difference between single-site and
multisite, etc. One thing that will help us here is breaking down existing
paradigms and creating new ones. For example, introducing the general
concept of open registration versus trusted networks will help us with the
arbitrary differences. [1]

I don't think we're going to be in this situation forever, as multisite is
seeing incremental improvements with every version now. A number of
contributors are increasingly putting their efforts squarely into making
multisite better, in many cases because it's their full-time job to run a
complex WordPress network (woop Jeremy Felt). In 3.9, for example, the
entire loading process got rewritten, which gets us closer to arbitrary
domain/path support.

tl;dr: Until it's straightforward enough for someone untechnical to use
multisite for a second blog for their cat, the installation process will
continue to be a set of hoops. For the cat, to, err, jump through.

still tl;dr: when multisite sucks less we'll make it easier to install.

Nacin

[1]
http://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/10/06/potential-roadmap-for-multisite/