Ultimately I ended up setting up a separate blog for each site and hoped to come back to it at some point.  That point was a couple weeks ago when I decided to do some maintenance on the sites.  I ended up using the main installation as a parent and linked (using Unix symbolic links) all of the sub-domain sites back to parent.  The only exception was the wp-content directory which is a real directory (so uploads can be unique) but within wp-content I linked back to the parent’s themes and plugins.

This worked pretty well – if I install a plugin or theme for the main site it is available for all of the sub-domain sites and when I upgrade WordPress, all of the sub-domain sites are upgraded as well.  Once I got this running, I wanted to share the users across all blogs.

After several attempts and numerous Google searches, I ended up following the directions in this thread and this thread and got everything to work.  I don’t particularly care for having to modify one of the core WordPress files since it will go away the next time I update WordPress but none of the other solutions I tried worked.

As a test, I have installed it on the site I am putting together for my youngest daughter’s soccer team (CASL Sharks) to see  how it works.  For the most part, I am impressed – it pretty much works as advertised.  I was able to login using my Facebook login and once my user was added to the WordPress user tables, I could change my permissions to allow my Facebook user id to post.  I still need to do some work to support Facebook Connect for comments but the instructions look pretty straight forward.  I think this would work well for the NCLTC and NCLUG sites as well although Facebook Connect requires PHP5 and those sites are hosted on a PHP4 based server so I’ll have to sort that out.

The only thing I use which is missing is the ability to link or preferably, display, a slide show.  I shoot a lot of pictures of our kids activities (skateboarding, soccer, basketball, swim team, etc.) and sharing them as a Flickr slide show is something I do frequently.

I found a solution to the missing slide show by using the Light Window plugin in conjunction with the Flickr URL for the slide show I am interested in presenting.

One of the main things I wanted to offer in this theme was the ability to choose a color scheme from an pre-set offering of about 8-10 choices.  This wasn’t too hard, I had done some similar in the original Sandbox Soccer theme.

As I worked on it I decided it would be nice to allow the user to define what the header should look like including their own image.  WordPress offers the ability to upload and use a custom theme header but this didn’t do quite what I wanted.  I decided to let the user choose a header image from the media library.  But what if the user wants multiple header images?  Hmmm.  This problem could get very complicate very quickly.  I decided to constrain the problem by providing the ability to define up to three (3) header images:  Left, center, and right.  Doing this would support the 3-4 sites I expect to use this theme on (my own CarolinaTrainBuiders.com site, NCLUG, NCLTC, and ILTCO).

Now that I knew what I wanted, how to implement it.  Simply showing the image options on a Theme Options page could potentially result in an enormous page.  I mentioned jQuery Accordion in a prior post, dividing the various options into sections using the Accordion made sense and was pretty straightforward once I upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4.

Once the Accordion was working I decided I wanted an elegant way to select the images.  Since this effort is a hobby and I largely do projects likes this to learn something, I decided I wanted to use a drag and drop mechanism to select the images.  Again, jQuery to the rescue, namely the jQuery draggable and jQuery droppable plugins.  In particular, the Simple Photo Manager demo was very close to what I had envisioned.

It has taken me a little while, mostly because I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it but I finally have a pretty slick theme options page working where the header images can be selected from the media library using drag and drop.  I am by no means a jQuery guru but I have learned a fair amount working this problem out.  The code I have isn’t ideal and I’ll continue to refine it but it is working so I can continue to develop the theme.  Once I get it running and released I will go back and clean up the jQuery code.  For now, getting it working and doing what I wanted was the primary task.

Since it wasn’t working, I went in search for a replacement and found a couple interesting sites.

• WebSiteTips.com:  Colour Scheme Chooser
• WebSiteTips.com:  Color Match ReMix Color Scheme Tool
• WebSiteTips.com:  Color Blender Tool

Of the three, I like the Color Match Remix Color Scheme Tool the best.  For a color neophyte like myself, these sort of resources are really useful.

Another resource I refer to pretty frequently is the Elementik’s Web design tools and resources I use page.  This page has links to all sorts of cool Javascript solutions, CSS tricks, color design resources, and more.

I was asked to help set up some blogs for a group of soccer teams that are traveling to Europe later this year after doing one for my daughter’s team (one of the teams).  This seemed like a good opportunity to try out WPMU since I’d also like to do it for my wp-SwimTeam plugin and make it available to swim teams as a hosted service.

Downloading and installing WPMU was pretty straight forward but getting it to work with sub-domain mode blogs turned out to be a challenge.  I have concluded that without the ability to edit the httpd.conf file, it isn’t possible to make it work.  I did manage to get the sub-directory mode working but that isn’t what I need for the soccer team project.

So for now, I am going to abandon WPMU and set up a series of regular WordPress blogs, one for each team.  I am also looking at wp-Hive to help with this.

The discussion referenced an interesting article which outlines how to develop a widget to ensure it will support multi-instances.