Anil Gulecha's Musings

I figured I’d write this guide for those who have certain needs to setup a blogging infrastructure for an organization.

I’ve joined the Nexenta project and one of my first tasks was to setup blogs and a planet. The requirements were thus:

• Ability to blog (yes!)
• A place to aggregate feeds (aka “Planet”)

My first choice was WordPress Mu, given that I already had experience with WP. Setting it up was easy.. below is a quick overview of what I did:

• Login to ssh.. and create a directory for blogs.nexenta.org.
• Setup the apache virtual host config for the above.
• Create a mysql database and a username/pass to access it.
• Get and extract the wpmu latest into this directory.
• Add a couple lines to /.htaccess
• Launch via the browser, and enter db and blog details.. and you’re done

Now to setup the planet.. install the following

• Plugin Commander (To easily manage plugins sitewide)
• FeedWordPress (For our planet feature)
• Did you pass math (To scare away the nasty spammers)

Set FeedWordPress to post feeds directly, and check for new content every 10-20 minutes. When you give it feed links of services like blogspot, be sure to pass RSS feeds rather than ATOM.

Add a few themes and your blogging platform is ready to serve.