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Working With Blogs

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There are four options for creating new blogs:

  1. Enable users to create their own using your signup page (e.g. http://edutags.net/signup/).
  2. Using Site Admin > Blogs
  3. Using Blog & User Creator
  4. Using Batch Create

Tips when creating blogs

  1. Use only lowercase letters and numbers in the blog address
  2. Don’t have any spaces in the blog address
  3. Users are sent an activation email when their blog is set up using the sign-up page
  4. Spam filters, especially strict ones for institutional email addresses, may well block username and login information from reaching users. In this case you should recommend users use free webmail accounts that won’t block the emails (such as gmail.com, hotmail.com or mail.yahoo.com)
  5. Until a blog is activated you won’t be able to locate it within Site Admin. Users have 48 hours to click on link in activation email to activate their blog.
  6. If your users do not have email addresses you can use Gmail method however creating lots of users using one gmail account isn’t recommended because Site Admin will need to do all password resets
  7. Use extreme caution when deleting blogs – once a blog has been deleted from the Site that blog URL can’t be reused.

Using Site Admin to Create New BlogsImage of blog tab

1. Click on Site Admin > Blogs

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page add the blog name, blog title and email address then click Add Blog

Image of add blog
Please note:
a) In this example the blog URL would be created as http://misty.wpmucamp.com
b) Blog URL’s can’t be changed once created
c) Blogs titles can be changed at any time
d) If a user hasn’t already been created a username will be created with the blog. In this example the username would be misty.
e) Username can be changed to nickname by the user at any time Users > Your Profile

Using Blogs & User Creator to Create New Blogs

Benefits of the Blog & User Creator include:

  1. Allows you and your users to create blogs in batches of up to 15 users and blogs at the same time, and they can add themselves as admin to them
  2. Your users can easily add themselves as a co-administrator of the blog they are creating so they can log into it the new blogs (e.g. edit settings, comments, posts)
  3. Time-saving feature for your users who regularly have to create numerous blogs for other people
  4. Advanced feature provides the ability to set user passwords
  5. The new blog don’t require email verification to activate the new blogs so users can instantly log into their account

Simple Version

There are two approaches that the Blog & User creator allows – first (in the simple version) you can drop in a username which will also function as the blog url and an email address… you can also decide if you want yourself to be added as admin to all of the blogs you create. Users will then be emailed their new blog details / usernames with standard WP random passwords.

Advanced Version

Second, you can try out the more advanced form that allows you to specify different usernames and blog urls, set users passwords, set each blogs titles and decide – per blog – whether you want to be admin or not.

Using Batch Create to Create New Blogs

Batch Create is the more advanced option for quickly creating a large number of blogs or users.

How it works is you create a CSV. text file using a simple text editor such as NotePad and then upload the file to Batch Create.

CSV stands for comma separate value file; all the information to create a user’s blog or username is on one line, and each item you specify is separated by a comma i.e. blog name, blog title, username, password and email address must be on the same line and separated by a comma.

Here is an example of a CSV. Text file:

1. Create a user with blog and preset password each line would look like this:

jamesqt3,James Blog,jamesqt3,mainsblog31,jamest3@gmail.com

2. To create a user with blog and auto-generated password each line would look like this:

sueqt3,Sue Blog,sueuqt3,null,sueqt3@gmail.com

3. To create a user without a blog each line would look like this:

null,null,seanqt3,mainsblog41,seanqt3@gmail.com

TIP:

DON’T use Excel to create your CSV. Text file because it frequently messes up the data putting user information onto new lines which will prevent the blogs from being created.

See Next: Editing blogs