Ron and I have been busy with Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags.
A new version of Domain Mapping was released a few days ago with a couple of bug fixes and also a new feature that allows you to ignore the “primary domain” on your blogs. It has the potential for duplicate content if a blog can be found at multiple domains but some people need this feature. With careful organisation of content this can be avoided.

Sitewide Tags is almost ready for a new release. Ron added thumbnail support last week, and I checked in code last weekend to fill in the tags page with posts made before the plugin was installed. It needs testing, and if you’re any good at PHP please take a look at the development version on the download page.

WP Super Cache has had a number of bugs squished, preloading works better – it cancels immediately when you click that Cancel button. It also prints the url of the current post being preloaded which is handy if you’re not sure it’s working or not.
I added some extra debugging to make sure the homepage is cached correctly, but you have to enable “extra paranoid checks”. It works fine on my sites but I would really appreciate feedback if you have WordPress installed in a directory, installed in a directory different to where the site is or whatever configuration you might have. If it doesn’t work, the only side effect is that the homepage won’t be cached so it’s easy to spot when there are problems. I want these checks to be active all the time when the new version is finally released so it’s important this works correctly. Grab the development version from the download page and give it a whirl!

Don’t worry about upgrading when the next versions of Super Cache and Sitewide Tags are released. The version number in the development version is the same as the current release so a new version notice will still appear on your dashboard.

I almost forgot. Cookies for Comments has been worked on too! I added code that keeps an eye on how long a visitor reads a post before they post a comment. If the comment is made faster than a certain time the comment is automatically caught. I’ve used it over the weekend here and elsewhere and it’s catching a good number of “real looking” but spammy comments! The development version on the download page is what you’re looking for if you want to try this.

I think I need a P2 blog to post these sort of updates. Blog titles are such a pain sometimes.

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New in this release:

• WordPress 3.0 support.
• Added “domains” page for superadmin to add domains to any blog. The user’s domains page can be disabled by the superadmin too.
• Added support for “www.” prefix in front of domains.
• Allow dashboard to redirect to mapped or original domain.
• Better support for SSL
• Translation file added for localization.

For security reasons remote login is now disabled if the dashboard is redirected to the mapped domain. There is a tiny chance of a man-in-the-middle attack during redirection, but it’s just as likely to happen when you’re logging in and sending your username/password to the login form. Call me paranoid.

I would like to thank Ron and Andrea who were a huge help developing and testing this release. Andrea has written a great post on creating a network in WordPress 3.0 plus instructions on upgrading from WordPress MU. Great stuff!

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• WordPress MU Domain Mapping
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It’s been a while since the last release but with the help of Ron Rennick, and many others (kgraeme – you kick ass at finding bugs!) I think the wait has been worth it. Changes since the last release:

1. Works in VHOST or folder based installs now.
2. Remote login added.
3. Admin backend redirects to mapped domain by default but can redirect to original blog url.
4. Domain redirect can be 301 or 302.
5. List multiple mapped domains on site admin blogs page if mapped
6. Bug fixes: set blogid of the current site’s main blog in $currentsite
7. Bug fixes: cache domain maps correctly, blogid, not blog_id in $wpdb.
8. and lots more bugs fixed and squashed.

There are still a few limitations however:

1. Your WordPress MU site should be installed in the root of your server.
2. It’s not possible to map a path on the new domain.
3. You cannot map a domain on to the main blog in a folder install of WordPress MU.

Grab it from the page above, make sure you read the readme.txt as the plugin needs to be installed and configured correctly. You’ll also need to be familiar with concepts such as CNAME and A DNS records and how to configure your server correctly.

Please try it first on a test server. We have gone to extraordinary lengths to try to fix every bug we could but it’s always better to be careful when trying out new software.

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This domain mapping plugin isn’t quite as powerful and still requires plenty of testing. So, while domains and “sub domains” or hostnames can be mapped to individual blogs, there are a number of caveats:

1. Remote login does not work. It’s possible to be logged in on the main site, logged in on the domain mapped blog as a different user or not logged in at all there!
2. It only works if your WordPress MU site is using sub domains.
3. It’s the 0.1 0.2 release. It’s basic.

Here’s the plugin page, and the download page. I’d like to hear how well it works for you.

I’m submitting this plugin to the WordPress MU plugin competition. There are only 2 other entries so the odds on my winning are pretty good!

I should have a Sitewide Tags update later this week, with thanks to Thomas Schneider who came on board last week to help and has done some super work!

Ron and Andrea found a bug in pre release testing that I forgot to fix in 0.1, so grab 0.2 if you were (un)lucky enough to grab the first release! Thanks Trent for testing too. Follow me on Twitter to get the inside scoop on my WordPress plugins, including a sort of super secret Twitter plugin..

WordPress MU is the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com and many other sites.

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