Mark your calendars for June 18, as (mt) Media Temple will be hosting the SoCal WordPress Users’ Group here at 8536 National Blvd., in Culver City. The topic has been set to cover some ways to monetize WordPress, and I will be speaking on some different Membership plugins that anyone may use to accomplish this. 
We have some special surprises and takeaways planned for that night, so make sure that if you would like to attend, to submit your RSVP’s after May 28.
On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend their awesome meetup, “Four Ways of Managing Multiple WordPress Sites” in Santa Monica, which was a pretty big meetup with about 70 eager WordPressers. The meetup organizer is Natalie MacLees, who is an awesome speaker/trainer, and happens to have the same radical pink WordPress iPhone case as me. 
Below are the four different ways to manage multiple WordPress sites:
1) WordPress Multisite
Belsien Thomas spoke on how to setup WordPress Multisite and recommended several useful plugins that work well with Multisite: WordPress MU Domain Mapping, New Blog Defaults, WPMU New Blog Templates, and Gravity Forms User Registration Add-on. His slides can be found here.
2) WPSiteStack
Glenn Bennet, the organizer of the Ventura Meetup, presented on WPSiteStack, which is free application that he created that allows you to have one WordPress installation to set up multiple sites using the same database with a different database prefix for each installation. His slides may be found here.
3) ManageWP
ManageWP was also presented, which is a paid 3rd party service that allows you to perform many maintenance functions easily such as backing-up, updating core and plugins, and managing users across sites. The fee is based on yur service level and the number of sites that you have. Jonathan did a live demo, so there are no slides.
4) InfiniteWP
Finally, Stacey Stanley did an excellent job covering InfiniteWP, which is an PHP MySQL application that you can install on your server or locally on your computer to manage different WordPress sites across different hosts. The cost for the application is free, but they do make addons, such as an addon for backing up, available for a small fee. There is no limit on the number of sites and it can be a real time saver. Her slides may be found here.
This was an excellent Meetup with a lot of information. I was aware of WordPress Multisite as a way to create and manage multiple blogs, but I was not aware of WPSiteStack, which looks like an awesome way to manage a bunch of sites on the same database. I have used both ManageWP and InfiniteWP before, but this meetup provided a great review of the features of each. On Wednesday, I will be headed up to San Diego for the Advanced WordPress Meetup, which should be a lot of fun!
I am the (mt) Media Temple WordPress Evangelist. (mt) Media Temple is a developer-friendly web hosting company, in Culver City, California, where I am known as “mt_Suzette”. I keep (mt) Media Temple support up-to-date on the latest in WordPress, I also speak at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps nationwide, blog at suzettefranck.com, and I am also a regular contributor on WPWatercooler.com. I have been a part of the WordPress Community since 2011, when I first spoke on BuddyPress at OC WordCamp.
I am hand-coder at heart, and I have been in love with web development for over 18+ years, including surviving the table layouts and font tags of the 90′s, up through coding my own PHP and MySQL content management system in 2000 before CMSs were in wide use. I discovered WordPress five years ago and I have used it to develop over 200 WordPress custom themes, mostly from the Twenty Eleven default theme.
I have always embraced new technology and I am eager to learn new things and show them to the world. I am an advocate for open source, wiki and documentation, and web standards. I am passionate about teaching others on the wonders of WordPress, and my hope is to inspire others to collaborate and share their knowledge.
