Mass/Bulk Blogging with the WPMU Platform
I felt this warranted some attention. Reason being is because a hack I had put together over 6 months ago seems to be getting some attention on the wordpress forum that I had stumbled upon just yesterday.
A while back I had posted on my personal blog satxseo.blogspot.com an article about how to create hundreds if not thousands of blogs in an instant. Call it what you will: automated blog site creation, mass blog creation, bulk blog site creation.
The code circumvents the standard admin interface in the blog site creation process with the wordpress multi-user platform. The idea I had was to be able to create a blogging platform which encompassed sub-topics of a general topic. For example, if you wanted to create a blog sphere about movie stars, you could register a single domain like bloggingthestars.com and build a csv file listing every movie star that ever existed. When you’re ready, then load the WPMU platform for your domain then simply use my tool to import your hundreds of thousands of movie star names which then created a separate blog site for each name like so:
- bradpitt.bloggingthestars.com
- angelinajoli.bloggingthestars.com
- etc…
- etc…
I had previously made the code available for download but later decided to take it down because of my fear of people using this tool to create splogs.
Well my views have changed. After seeing the attention that it was getting and the fact that even if someone were to use it to accomplish the blog creation process, the fact remains that these individuals creating their MFA sites and/or Link Farms still need legitimate content.
So, if you intend to use the tool for dark-side purposes, good luck. I invite you to waste your time. Google and Technorati have triggers to catch the best of automated content generators, content rewriters, and plagiarizers so enjoy your ride into the needle in a hay stack internet abyss.
If you find the tool useful for creating your idea of a very own blog sphere please share! As I am making this tool available again.
If you want legitimate content, Totus has a team of writers ready to create legitimate content for your idea. If you have a blogging idea of a lifetime but lack the technical know-how, we would be more than happy to create and manage your blog sphere for you.
The scripts can be found: http://www.totus.us/csv2blog.tar.gz
If you need consulting on how-to, please feel free to contact us.
August 16th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
interesting article, thanks!
November 6th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I’m creating a bunch of blogs and I’ve found lots of NOTHING regarding the topic of bulk creation, etc.
Frankly, tools can be used for good or evil and this fear of Splogs and Spammers is just a pain in the butt. The evil people will always figure it out but the tools that good people need aren’t there.
Drives me crazy. Thanks for making this available.
Any links on the format of the CSV file?
November 6th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Thanks Vive for the kind words. I believe the format is simply
blogname, account login
Its been sometime since I’ve used it.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Hi Troy,
I’ve been trying out wpmu lately and checking out the various plugins available on wpmudev. I think I’ve pretty much got your csv2blog one working but I’m getting a couple of errors after I submit the file path.
Unfortuantely my PHP is not great yet – I’m learning
– so I can’t figure out what’s going wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated. The errors are:
Warning: fgetcsv(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/common.php on line 103
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/common.php on line 112
Thanks again,
Matt.
P.S. – You’re welcome to email me – mattlancaster at hotmail dot co dot uk.
November 9th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
looks like it may be the format of your csv file. Its been some time since I’ve used it but as I recall I thinks its as follows.
blogname, admin, password
the errors you have are parser errors I think, which means format common.php is looking for is incorrect. Try taking a look at the code in common.php as well.
November 11th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Well, I’ve spent more time investigating this issue. First, I never did use your tool. After reading around the net, you’re tool is thought of highly but I didn’t have time to do the CSV file.
*cough*
Instead, I had time to take one of the Bulk Creation plugins out there and MAKE it work. I think I just wanted a “project” to work on.
Anyway, I’m thinking about writing about my experience, since it took most of Friday night to finally figure out that there is a bug in WPMU that doesn’t allow the plugins out there to use the native “wpmu_create_blog()” function.
There is a patch to WPMU that will fix that bug here: http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/394/wp_create_blog.diff
However, I digress.
November 11th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
[...] Mass/Bulk Blogging with the WPMU Platform A while back I had posted on my personal blog satxseo.blogspot.com an article about how to create hundreds if not thousands of blogs in an instant. Call it what you will: automated blog site creation, mass blog creation, bulk blog site creation. [...]
November 11th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Vivevt, thank you for the kind words and helping others with your experience with wpmu and the tool.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Hello
Well, i like your addon but i cant make it to work with the latest MU version!
Can you explain me? i change all settings in commond.php file, added the password, the host, created the csv file, made 777 the main directory, uploaded all settings and when i launch the script, it give me “1 blog created” because i added only 1 line… and nothing… the blog is not there.
I also corrected the bugs and change some settings in the scheme and upgrade files… tested and nothing… i got the same…
Can you give me some instructions? your addon can help me a lot!
my email is adultsponsors at gmail
Wait for your comments.
Thanks
Damian
December 12th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
We are just testing an MU setup. I adjusted the common.php to reflect our settings and your script created 5 blogs for me in the MySql table, but didn’t add the blogs themselves to the the wp_blogs table. Did I miss a config option somewhere?
December 12th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
CLARFICATION – the 5 blogs are in the MySQL db as tables, just no entries in the main tables to hook them to the MU system or users.
December 13th, 2007 at 10:32 am
I would like to second Damian’s problem – Damian, I bet if you look in your mysql db, you will find that the tables for the blog are there, just not the records in the wp tables that hook it all up.
December 15th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Oops! Wrong blog comment! Sorry!!
Please delete that comment!
December 31st, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’m really intrested in using this plugin, I’m kind of new to using WPMU. if you would be kind enough to provide some instrucitions I would appreciate it very much. My address is jibstar1uk at hotmail dot com.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
I have looked at your scripts for importing all of our teachers into wpmu, and can’t get it to work right. Can you shoot me over what I need to change, and where to put the scripts? Thanks in advance.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:15 am
Hello ive been reading all this with interest and boy will this make my life easier when i try and create a blog for every town and city in the UK. Problem is im having the same problem as Matt. I know it’s down to my own stupidity. I would love to get this working as you can guess it is going to save me a hell of a lot of time.
Ive uploaded the files to my root and then went to the index. I get browse/submit query page so so far so good. Nows the tricky bit. Ive opened Excel and ive put (letters of colomns)-
Aberdeen (a) , (b) admin (c) , (d) admin password (e)
and saved it as an XML file.
What bits have i done wrong already? All help appreciated as im fearing starting my project without this.
Thanks
May 25th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
is it still works on latest WPMU (v1.51) ?
June 29th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Hi,
This plugin seems to be really interresting but i believe it does not work any more with the last version of MU, think you make an update or not?
Other question, where can I find the procedure of installation?
Thanks a lot
Morgan, student,
platform: http://pubarts.org
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:25 am
I hope that you will help me. I think this could solve my problem. We are a small non-profit organization. We provide services to grassroots (mainly start up) organizations. We have spend the last 3 months setting up ecommerce sites to fund these various causes. Last week our hosting service crashed and lost everything. the last back up I have did not work because their servers were not working properly. (they were responding very slowly causing various problems)
so, i am trying to reconstruct 77 sites. I have one with the pluggins and setting and if this will create the rest of the sites. With the settings and pluggins then the content will be all that needs to be added to finish.
thanks,
Julie
November 16th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Hi Troy
Just come across your blog and I think your creation tool may just be what I need. I’m a secondary school teacher and I’m trying to create multiple users each with their own blog for use in lessons.
Can you let me know how I would go about using your tool for this.
many thanks
Steve
August 28th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Hi Troy
I’m really interested in using this plugin, I’m kind of new to using WPMU. if you would be kind enough to provide some instructions I would appreciate it very much. My address is mail at itsanimesh dot com