Shanti’s Dispatches

I’m working on a set of scripts that could come in handy for anyone who manage 2+ WordPress blogs.

Some of the tasks you face when managing multiple WP blogs:

1) Upgrading to newer versions of WP

2) Making sure upgrades go as smoothly as possible (limit breakage of plugins and broken plugins impact on the blogs)

3) Cleaning out comment spam from the database in an automated fashion (these days if Akismet thinks its spam, I’ll take their word for it, even if it means a few false positives slip through)

4) Automated database + static file Backups (you are backing up your database at least once in a blue moon, riiiight?)

5) Off server backups (Amazon S3)

—- Bonus round:

6) One-click install of a new plugin across X number of WP blogs (you know how time consuming this can be if you’ve had to do it before!)

7) One-click setting of a WordPress feature like, say, the permalink URL pattern to be “%postname%” for SEO-friendly URLs

I’ve actually managed to accomplish most of the above with a few Ruby scripts that I’ve cobbled together.

If anyone’s super-interested, drop me a line in the comments.

For now the scripts are a bit hackish; they assume you’re using cPanel + WHM and follow certain conventions when setting up your blog (i.e. username_wp for the DB, etc).

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos