WordPress MU is a multi user or multi blog version of WordPress that can be used to run sites like WordPress.com.
MU Admins! Please download and test wpmu-2.8.1-beta.zip on a test server! This is a beta release that is this <—> close to being final but it needs testing by the community.
It works fine on my test server but I haven’t been able to test every last thing to death. That’s where you come in. Download it, install it, login, look around. Notice anything broken? That’s what Trac is for. Verify you can repeat the problem, open a ticket and describe how the problem can be reproduced. Well done. You’ve just contributed to a Free Software project. 
PS. I know there are two “My Blogs” links in the beta. That was fixed 2 days ago. Grab the zip file from the end of this page to get the most up to date code.
23 Comments
ana (1 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 7:00 pm.
WOW, congratulations! and thank you!
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Andrea_R (7 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 7:49 pm.
You’ve been a busy guy. Nice work in there.
slaFFik (1 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 7:55 pm.
So, it the nearest future we will see 2.8.1 without 2.8? Quite interesting…
Jon Kristian Nilsen (1 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 8:12 pm.
Awesome! Can’t wait to try it out:)
beachbum on July 6, 2009 at 8:17 pm.
I have read that MU is going to be merged with regular wordpress, is this true and any timeframe of when?
Jacob Share (4 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 8:36 pm.
Will this be the last version of WPMU that’s separate from WP?
Donncha (1707 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 8:42 pm.
Oh, there’s been a hell of a lot of discussion about that hasn’t there? Will it happen at 2.9, 3.0, 3.1 even?
Well, I can definitely say “maybe”.
Slamlander (1 comments.) on July 6, 2009 at 10:45 pm.
Can you give us anything better than a ‘definite maybe’?
Alex Plant on July 7, 2009 at 1:49 am.
Donncha, you are a good man. Will be testing the new 2.8 custom taxonomy features.
WordSkill (11 comments.) on July 7, 2009 at 2:19 am.
Excellent, this and the 1.0 release of bbPress just a few days ago is great timing for something I’m working on, thank you!
mwaterous (1 comments.) on July 7, 2009 at 3:59 am.
Aw but if they merged, we wouldn’t get seperate forums anymore on mu.wordpress.org! heh… Looking greatly forward to seeing it stable (though to be fair it seems pretty much that way now) and deploying it. New to MU, but loving it up!
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Cheryl Johnson (3 comments.) on July 7, 2009 at 1:06 pm.
Okie-dokie. Downloaded now. Will install on test location shortly…… Thanks, Donncha!
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Gary (3 comments.) on July 9, 2009 at 9:39 am.
Hey Donncha,
This is great stuff.
Here are some tiny issues that rather than putting in the official tracker I’ll pop in here:
wp-content/blogs.php has CRLF line endings. A couple of others do too but I can’t remember which.
wp-admin/wpmu-blogs.php
Lines 350 – 360 approx
You have an ampersand but needs to be encoded. 3 cases on the variable $url2
Gary
Donncha (1707 comments.) on July 9, 2009 at 4:48 pm.
Thanks Gary, fixed those.
anointed on July 9, 2009 at 9:07 pm.
Not sure if it is buddypress related or 2.8.1, but there are a few posts about incompatibility already. I was going to try 2.8.1 myself, but as I run buddypress as well, I figured it would be smart to check here first to see what the problem may actually be.
Comments from bp forums:
1.Hi, I’ve got the members theme installed in /wp-content/bp-themes/bpmember but I’m still getting the message: You do not have any BuddyPress themes installed…. when I visit the members/blogs/groups links using the default home theme. The URLs look good.
Also, when I hover over an avatar, the URL is showing /index.php/members/jwinn and it resolves to /members/jwinn with the above error, too.
2.Hi all, did you tested BuddyPress with latest WPMU 2.8.1 (beta)? I tried it, but could not create groups and there were also other problems… Did you manage to run your BuddyPress with WPMU 2.8.1?
Donncha (1707 comments.) on July 10, 2009 at 12:59 pm.
I have BP installed on my test server and was able to create a test group too. Not sure about the other issues.
Gary (3 comments.) on July 10, 2009 at 8:59 pm.
Hi Donncha,
Glad those worked!
One thing I’ve always wanted with WPMU is for users to set their own sitewide language. For example, I work with a number of Japanese sites and if a user sets their blog as Japanese, then English speakers who are members of the site and perhaps of a Japanese ‘community’ blog are forced to try to read the Japanese in the Dashboard. I actually wrote a plugin for this but ultimately couldn’t get it to work because of the way
/wp-settings.php
inits the $locale_file
before the user.
I was thinking that the locale_file file should be set after we have user data, so we can allow a registered user to have a single file. Perhaps there is a way round this but I could work it out.
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Bilbao on July 13, 2009 at 2:56 pm.
Has the sitewide tags plugin been tested on 2.8.1 yet? The plugin page still says up to 2.7 on it…