If you haven’t already, then check out Part 1.

Part 2 – New Blog Settings

Ok, so you’ve already installed WPMU and you’re able to log in (and you’ve already changed the admin password to something memorable, right? (Users > Admin, bottom of the page)).

The first thing you need to do is put New Blog Defaults in your wp-contenet/mu-plugins/ folder.  This little beauty will do several things: change the default first post category from “Uncategorized” to “Articles”, remove the wordpress.com and wordpress.org links from the Blogroll and replace them with a link to your site’s main page, and change the default permalink structure to /categroy/post-title/ among others.   The most important part here is that it places the link to your main page in the blogroll.  This will improve usability for all parties, but especially first time visitors to your site.

It’s time to put CETS Simple Dashboard in to play. Download, and place in your mu-plugins folder.

Next, you need to navigate to Site Admin -> Options.  Here, you need to change “Allow New Registrations” to Enabled (assuming you followed my instructions in part 1) and also change the text in the default first post, enable third-party plugins, and deactivate those annoying dashboard feeds thanks to Simple Dashboard.

At this point  I would also recommend Plugin Commander.  This handy little sucker goes in your /wp-plugins/ folder (with plugin-commander.php going directly in the folder, and it’s subfolder in there too).  This tool will allow you to bulk activate, bulk deactivate, and manually assign plugins to any and all blogs.  Handy if you want to enable wp-cache or something like that as a feature on all blogs.

Next time, we’re going to look at widgets, admin plugins, and some other handy plugins for your users you may want to give up.

Part 3 – Widgets, Plugins, and More Plugins (Coming Soon)