Morpho Designs

The Fish, the Bait and the Club

March 20th, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |

Photo by Mitch

This post comes with a bonus word game!
Yours to keep, even if you skip the rest of the story!

Fish

I was hunting around for a program that could simplify the management of my growing library of WordPress themes.
Here is what I want this program to do:

• Catalog the library
• Indicate price paid and usage license
• Flag all active themes
• Track any changes to the original files
• Track plugin and widget incompatibilities
• Store image sizes
• Allow new tracking fields to be added later

Bait

I chose keywords like “manage multiple WordPress themes”.

Google returned some interesting results:

• WordPress Cloner plugin
• Manage Multiple Blogs
• Blog Matrix Pro

While none of these seemed to deal with themes alone, they sounded like an even better solution.

The reason was that they promised to allow me to maintain multiple blogs from a single control panel.

I studied each of them in turn. I quickly decided that WordPress Cloner was not going to help me.
As its name implied, it focuses on duplicating parts of one blog throughout a network of related blogs.

Manage Multiple Blogs was not what I needed, either. This program simplifies the task of posting to multiple blogs. It did expose me to the concept of the WordPress Remote Procedure Call API, which I thought was cool.

Finally, I took a look at Blog Matrix Pro.

Club

Actually, Blog Matrix Pro, poked me in the eye with that red-hot Sales letter Headline:

Create And Run MULTIPLE WordPress Blogs From Just ONE Simple Install!
Initially, I was excited by the possibilities.

I do know that multiple blogs can share a single MySQL database, so the one simple install made sense.

Scanning past the hype, the testimonial and the proclamation of authority, I headed straight for the benefits:

With Blog Matrix Pro and WordPress™ (weblog software) you can quickly and easily build your own empire of niche blogs… entire websites based around any topic or market to just about dominate specific targets within that market.

• Automatically Create Unlimited Numbers Of Blogs
• Always Stay Updated
• Complete Management Flexibility
• Push Button Blog Management
• Automatic Plugins

Complete Management Flexibility was the deal maker. The sales copy let me know that

Each Blog has it’s own WP Admin area even though there is only one set of WP Files, so you can customize each blog independently and add as many themes as you wish.

Catch and Release

Once I recovered from the sales letter-induced trance, I realized that I didn’t need this product.

In one of those “duh” moments, I reread the Complete Management Flexibility bit and thought,
“I already manage as many themes as I want!”

WordPress makes it ridiculously easy to change themes.

I don’t want an empire of niche blogs*, I want one Empire of the Niche.

Besides, as far as I could tell from the sales letter, Blog Matrix Pro doesn’t do what I was looking for!

I think I’ll fire up my old Visual Basic compiler and get to work.

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* I have no desire to bash this product. It may do what the developer claims.

It sounds really cool, from a technical point of view.

Just remember, Spidey: with great power comes great responsibility.