Customize for Mult. Users

Here is a quick idea that might even work…just theorizing, again it wouldn’t be too painful if you are on a *nix and know a tiny bit of shell scripting. It actually would be fairly upgradeable too.
Here is what I would propose you give a try:
Install WP in a location and use this as your “main” install. Go through the setup procedure, so create something like http://www.ferrellweb.com/blogs/JMF/
Once that blog works here is how I think you can create a student’s blog without too much pain.
Create a new directory that is http://www.ferrellweb.com/blogs/SomeStudent/
Place the wp-config.php and wp-layout.css file in that directory. Change the wp-config.php line with the table prefeix to be something like wp_SomeStudent_ instead of wp_ or wp_JMF_ (depending on how you set it up the first time)
Ok, now comes the shell script. You need to make symlinks from the student directory to the main WP directory. this should let WP find the files it needs and allow you to have custom setups per student without having to have 100 copies of the files. It would also allow you to add hacks/plugins as needed.
Of course, it doesn’t help with massive proliferation of tables in the database, but that requires a lot more hacking.

The problem with the symlink method of creating multiple blogs is that wp-login.php finds the wp-config.php file by doing a dirname(__FILE__) call and then appending “wp-config.php”.
This gets the REAL directory where that file resides, not the directory
where the currently used symlink is located — and voila, we’re messed up.
So right now I am trying this out with dirname(__FILE__) removed from
wp-login.php; since wp-login.php is in the same directory as wp-config.php this should not really matter.
Another potential problem is that references with “..” refer to the REAL parent directoy rather than the symlink; so at least the directories must not be symlinks but actual directories. I’m appending a perl script which does this; make sure you adjust some of the vars at the top. And remember to remove the call to dirname at teh top of wp-login.php.
Wolf Paul
makeblog script:
—- cut here —-
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Turn this off if you don’t want output
$Debug = 1 ;
# This should be the directory of the original WP installation
$BLOGSRC = “/var/www/html/wordpress” ;
# This should be the directory in which you want to create the new blog
$BLOGBASE = “/var/www/html/blogs” ;
# this is the user who should own all the files in the new blog
$WEBUSER = “apache” ;
die “Usage: $0 new_blog_name\n” unless $ARGV[0] ;
# New blog name is specified on the commandline
$NEWBLOG = $ARGV[0] ;
# perl chown needs numeric args
$webuid = (getpwnam($WEBUSER))[3] ;
$webgid = (getpwnam($WEBUSER))[4] ;
# create new blog dir
mkdir(“$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG”) ;
# go to original blog
chdir($BLOGSRC) ;
# get a list of all subdirs — sorry, I’m too lazy to do this in perl
open(DIRS, “find . -type d -print|”) ;
while ( <DIRS> )
{
chomp ;
s/^\.\/// ; # that’s cosmetic, it would work anyway
$dir = $_ ; # that’s also just for comprehension, we could use $_ directly
print “DIR is $dir\n” if $Debug ;;
mkdir(“$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$dir”) unless $dir eq “.” ; # “.” already exists, so we dont need to make it
chown($webuid,$webgid,”$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$dir”) ;
@files = <$BLOGSRC/$dir/*> ;
foreach $file ( @files )
{
if ( -f $file ) # discard subdirs
{
$basefile = $file ;
$basefile =~ s/$BLOGSRC\/$dir\/// ;
print “\tLinking $file\n\t\ttto $BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$dir/$basefile\n” if $Debug ;
symlink($file, “$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$dir/$basefile”) ;
}
}
}
close DIRS ;
# These three files are good to have locally (in fact, wp-config.php cannot be a symlink)
foreach $file ( “index.php”, “wp-config.php”, “wp-layout.css” )
{
print “Unlinking $BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$file\n” if $Debug ;
unlink(“$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$file”) ;
print “Copying $BLOGSRC/$file\n\tto $BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$file\n” if $Debug ;
&copy(“$BLOGSRC/$file”, “$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$file”) ;
chown($webuid,$webgid,”$BLOGBASE/$NEWBLOG/$file”) ;
}
sub copy
{
($src,$targ) = @_ ;
open(SRC, $src) or die “cannot open $src for reading” ;
open(DST, “>$targ”) or die “cannot open $targ for writing” ;
while ( <SRC> )
{
# this adjusts the table prefix to include teh name of teh new blog
if ( /^\$table_prefix = / )
{
print DST “\$table_prefix = ‘wp_${NEWBLOG}_’; // example: ‘wp_’ or ‘b2’ or ‘mylogin_’\n” ;
next ;
}
print DST ;
}
}
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O.K., I spent some more time on this.
Unfortunately the script as posted last night does not do the trick, because
it turns out that even when the directories are real (not symlinks), the reference “..” refers back to the REAL parentdirectory of the file.
So I now have a modified version (all it really does is replace
the “symlink” function call with “link”) which creates the directory
structure and then hard links all of the files. This way everything seems
to work (tested it quite extensively). It still makes index.php, wp-config.php and wp-layout.css separate local files.
One other change I made was to optionally set $tableuser in wp-config.php and wrap the corresponding line in wp-settings.php in an ‘if ( $tableusers == “” )’ — this way one can use ONE usertable for
multiple related blogs (i.e., I have an English and a German blog).
To answer the questions posed by JMF (sorry, I forget that people have different levels of acquaintance with code :-):
1. Since links are a UNIX feature, this will only work on a UNIX-like OS (i.e. any real UNIX, Linux, BSD, etc).
2. Yes, BLOGSRC and BLOGBASE need to be changed to reflect
your setup; WEBUSER is the user under which your Apache webserver runs, not YOUR account. Usually it will be something like “apache” or “web” or “httpd”. If you put the following code into a file in your web root, say “getinfo.php” and then view it with your browser, you can scroll down to the “APACHE” section and find the User/Group values about six rows down:

<?php
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();
?>

3. Download the PERL script from http://www.doulos.at/makeblog.pl, edit it as described above and upload it to your webserver (make sure you save it in UNIX format, i.e. only newlines rather than CR/NL at the end of lines). Then make it executable with “chmod +x filename”.
4. It is advisable to think carefully about any mods to the distributed wordpress which you want to have in ALL blogs, and to make these to the master copy before creating “clones” with makeblog.
5. Call the script at the commandline as
“makeblog.pl NEWBLOGNAME”
which will put the new blog into a subdir called NEWBLOGNAME in the BLOGBASE directory, and will also modify the new blog’s wp-config.php to use wp_NEWBLOGNAME_ as the table prefix.
6. Run the new blog’s wp-admin/install.php and you’re done.
7. I suspect that after an upgrade (minor upgrades at least) to WordPress
you can just save any modified index.php, wp-layout.css, and wp-config.php files for each blog, delete the individual blog subdirs, and then re-create them from the updated master with makeblog. If you used the same NEWBLOGNAME, you then just need to copy your saved
files back, and the blog should work with the new code and the old database tables without running install.php again.

Sorry, I forgot that the .pl extension will try to execute as a cgi-program,
but EXEC-CGI is turned off for that directory.
I have renamed the file to http://www.doulos.at/makeblog.pl.src, just download
and then rename to makeblog.pl.