Best Free Multisite Plugins to Manage All Your WP Sites
19th Jun 2013 | Posted by Eko S. | 2 CommentsIn The Social Network, Napster founder Sean Parker tells Mark Zuckerberg, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” So, if having a WordPress site is cool, what can be cooler? Having several WordPress sites. A lot of big businesses (including WP itself), and organizations (like Harvard University) use a multisite WP system, as it helps them to manage all the sites as one big site. The best part? All of them run on a single installation of WordPress.
Welcome to the world of the WordPress Multisite
The WordPress Multisite is a great way to create, own and manage a number of blogs at the same time. Giving the go-ahead to Multisite lets you manage several sites from just one WP installation. Now that is one big time saver! And the best example of WordPress Multisite? WordPress.com! Every blog on WordPress.com is part of a huge multisite network, which is a platform that hosts thousands of sites each with completely different purposes, functions, and goals. Just like a hub and spoke. Or even a tree, for that matter with a trunk and many branches.
Blogger’s best friend
WordPress Multisite offers a lot of opportunities for bloggers. And the best part of it? It is quite easy to learn the ropes and tweak it around with a superadmin (That’s right, while WordPress sites have admins, a Multisite installation has a superadmin!), there are loads of things you can do with it: you can customize plugins throughout the network, customize your theme, as well as promote all your blogs in your own network!
Something that is quite different with WordPress Multisite is the way you handle plugins. Plugins are installed in the network admin, and are made available for use to any site throughout the network. You can choose either to network activate the plugin (use it throughout the network) or enable it just on a single website, as that site’s admin. As you might very well expect, there are a lot of plugins that could help you out a lot while running a WordPress Multisite network.
Let’s take a look at some of the most amazing ones!
1. Multisite Plugin Manager
Before you install a whole bunch of plugins, you need a sneaky little interface that will help you manage all those plugins over a vast and growing network. Multisite Plugin Manager helps you do just that. You can select what plugins your various sites have access to. Other handy features include auto-activation, and probably my favorite: mass activate/mass deactivate plugins throughout the network! This is easily the best plugin to manage plugins throughout your multisite network.
2. WP Recent Network Posts
Want users who are checking out your main site (or any other internal blog for that matter) to check out the other amazing blogs that you write from time to time? Well, this is the plugin for you! This plugin pull the recent posts from all the blogs in your network and displays them in your main site (or any internal site) using shortcodes or widgets. Definitely the easiest way to promote your blog in-house
3. User Switching
Managing a WordPress Multisite takes a lot of work. You might want to perform a lot of tests before you get your blog up and running. Or you might have multiple user accounts to manage different blogs. Whatever the case maybe, it is quite handy to be able to switch between user accounts. With a lot of easy user switching options (such as the “Switch Back” and the “Switch Off” options) and no compromise on security (Only users with the ability to edit other users can switch user accounts; lower levels cannot), this plugin can take care of several issues at once. Safe to say, this is a must-have plugin for multi-user platforms.
4. Hide Inactive Sites
This is a useful plugin that hides those sites on your network that have had no activity for a while, based on the criteria that you have set for the same. You can do this easily by setting an inactivity threshold for each blog. It can be very handy, especially when you have a particular site on your network, which you don’t update very often, and you want to make sure your main site looks nice and clean to new readers. No more going through menus and codes to hide those pesky little sites!
5. RPS Sitemap Generator
A simple, lightweight XML generator designed with the end-user in mind, this plugin works by giving each blog in the network a unique sitemap. You can also choose to exclude individual posts, or even pages from your sitemap, and change your sitemap’s location with a custom path. This is a handy plugin for those of you who find it difficult with sitemap generation and updating, especially with WP Multisite, and want to get it over with it fast.
6. User Role Editor
When you have a lot of users on your multisite, a little bit of human resource management can go a long way. With User Role Editor, you can change user role (except admin) capabilities with a few clicks. Just turn on check boxes of capabilities you wish to add to the selected role. simple, isn’t it? Who knows? Your site could become the next thing in blog management!
You can add a new role and customize its capabilities according to your needs.
Looks like you’re all set to be a superadmin to your very own WP Multisite network. Look out for all those sneaky spammers though. And make sure your blog stays popular! Although it might look like a fair bit of work, its always nice to have those social media and anti-spam plugins installed on your site. Oh, and by the way, personal blogs are not the best for WP Multisites!
- Written by Aravind -
He is with blogVault, a Premium WordPress Backup Service. blogVault specializes in backups for WordPress users, and believes that best code is only as good as the customer service that goes with it.
About The Author
Hi, Thank you for this list. Just what I needed for my WP training course where each student has access to a site within a WP multisite installation. Great work.!