Build your own blog network with unlimited users and blogs, forums, photo gallery, and more! Design, develop, secure, and optimize your blog network with the installation of a user WordPressAdd limited and blogs, and give permissions differently on various networking features blogsAdd social to your blog using BuddyPressCreate forum bbPress for your users to communicate with each otherPart from Packt's Beginner's Guide Series, with step-by-step, detailed instructions for building a blog network from scratch In Detail WordPress MU allows you to build a network, a professional full blog. WordPress MU power some of the world's largest blog network, including WordPress.com mighty - home to thousands of bloggers. This book will take you through a powerful network setup Wordpress MU blogging, using a real, working network of blogs as an example, so you can follow the step-by-step process. Your blog network will be complete with professional features such as friends list, status feed, group, forum, photo gallery, and more, to build your own WordPress.com - a place where users can quickly come and create your own blog. The book begins with a clean installation of WordPress MU, and when you work through this book, you will build a network of blogs, and adding more features, all seamlessly integrated to achieve the look, custom-built professional. You'll find new themes and plug-ins added to the site, as well as multi-user customization of the code of WordPress. What you will learn from this book? Create and run your own blog network using multi-user version of the most popular open source blogging network platformMonetize your blog and earn revenue from using a simple banner ads paid for upgrades and revenue sharing modelsGive users the opportunity to interact with each other and build community spirit by integrating forum with your network siteHook your blog to social networking sites like TwitterIncrease traffic to your site with tagging, trackbacks, pings, and popular features like gravatars RSSAdd, polls, photo galleries, friends list, and moreSecure your blog network, and protect it from spam with reCAPTCHA and bad BehaviourImplement backup and performance optimization techniques that will ensure that your blog network will be capable of handling a large number of visitors Approach Packed with easy to follow examples and screenshots, this book is designed to be followed from beginning to end, although they are by no WordPress MU site will be able to jump in the subsequent chapters and choose the things that are important to them. Throughout this book you will build a network of blogs for Vampire Slayers-SlayerCafe.com, as an example. Who is this book written for? If you want to manage multiple blogs and build a network of blogs, then this book is for you.