WordPress Multisites - Any regrets? or 100% content

[Whitey]

Have any of the experienced hands at Webmasterworld any regrets using WordPress Multisites to manage a lot of site's, or , if based on their experience they would be recommending of any significant issues to look out for.

Did it do what you wanted, or did anyone hit any costly development or webmaster snags at some later point that other's could benefit newbies to be aware of.

[cfx211]

It has worked out fine for us. No regrets.

[rogerd]

Hmmm, no direct experience here. How many sites were you managing, cfx211?

[cfx211]

Sorry for the late late reply. I am running about 5 WP sites on my MU install. I would not consider it a lot, but its enough. These sites are all ones that only internal people update.

For other WP sites where we have contractors touching them, they get their own install, username, associated FTP account, etc...

[ergophobe]

The one downside I've had with drupal multisites is when modules and themes get updated at different rates, so if you have a core update and some modules are incompatible, you are stuck.

If you use the same modules on all sites, no problem - you're stuck no matter what. But if you have 4 simple sites and one that is all tricked out with a complex theme and a zillion plugins, your update may be held back for all sites while you wait for compatible plugins for the one site.

If the sites are all rather similar and start with the same base theme and similar sets of plugins, no problem.

[TheGreenovator]

The question I have is when using multisite, is the duplicate content going to affect your SERPS. If so, is there a workaround?

[d3vrandom]

There is no duplicate content. I mean you can set it up so that it redirects to your domain name. So for example if you go for a multisite subdirectory install and then use the domain mapping plugin you can have it redirect from the subdir to the domain.

[kururunfa]

I ran eight sites on a MU install for a long with no serious issues (a couple of plugins had trouble, but replacements were easily found).

The only thing I'd say to watch out for is that MU can be a bit of a resource hog and some shared hosts don't like it. In my case the sites were low/moderate traffic, on a VPS.