What I’ve Been Building with Ultimate Multisite

An update for my readers—and a path to get started fast.

Visit UltimateMultisite.com

Over the past few months, I’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into Ultimate Multisite — an open-source project that continues where WP Ultimo left off. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what it is, why it matters, and what’s new.

What Is Ultimate Multisite?

WordPress has had multisite functionality for years, but it’s notoriously barebones when it comes to running a network as a platform. That’s where Ultimate Multisite comes in. It’s a plugin designed to make multisite practical for:

  • Agencies hosting multiple client sites
  • SaaS & WaaS providers who want to sell websites as a service
  • Power users who want better control over their multisite setup

Core features include domain mapping, site duplication, user management, memberships, subscriptions, and WaaS tools — essentially, everything you need to turn WordPress Multisite into a product or a managed platform.

What’s New Lately

  • WordPress.org Release — Ultimate Multisite is now officially available on the
    WordPress.org plugin repository. That means automatic updates, community-powered translations, and better discoverability.
  • Version 2.4.4 — The latest release brings numerous fixes and improvements (see the full release notes on
    GitHub).
  • Add-On Marketplace — An ecosystem of extensions, including WooCommerce integration, so you can expand functionality as needed.
  • Growing Community — This is no longer a one-person project. We now have five active contributors; the bus factor is much healthier and discussion happens openly via issues and PRs.

Installation Made Easy

One of the biggest wins of being on WordPress.org is how simple installation has become:

  1. Go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Search for Ultimate Multisite.
  3. Click Install Now, then Activate.

That’s it — you’re ready to go. Prefer manual installs? Grab the ZIP from GitHub or WordPress.org and upload it directly.

Install from WordPress.org
View on GitHub

Why This Matters

If you’re running a WordPress Multisite setup today, Ultimate Multisite saves you hours of custom development and duct-taped plugins. Instead of piecing things together, you get a maintained, community-driven toolkit built specifically for this use case.

And if you’re building a WaaS or SaaS on top of WordPress, this plugin is quickly becoming the go-to choice.

How You Can Help

  • Try the latest release — Download from WordPress.org or GitHub.
  • Leave a review — Reviews on WordPress.org help build trust and visibility.
  • Contribute — Code, docs, testing, or feedback via GitHub issues and PRs are all welcome.

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Setup VPS with Debian, Nginx and Virtualmin

I recently upgraded my VPS to use Nginx and Virtualmin and found it to be a killer setup. Nginx is superfast in a low memory setup and Virtualmin GPL edition is a powerful and free control panel which I have found to be more intuitive than Cpanel. This guide will walk through what is required to setup a VPS with Debian, Nginx and Virtualmin.

Purchase and Install VPS

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How to style input tag file uploads in Webkit (Chrome, Safari)

If you’ve ever been tasked with creating a consistent user experience across all web browsers you’ve probably had a real challenge styling form input elements. Historically IE has been the most challenging to style but with file input elements webkit is almost impossible to change it from the default “choose file” dialog. Typically the file input is styled by setting it’s opacity to 0 and absolute positing it over an image of a browse button with whatever style is desired. The downside of this is that is requires JavaScript to update a text input element after a file is chosen with the file selection dialog. This technique uses pure CSS to present a consistent interface to all major browsers with a few vendor CSS prefixes.
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Use webp images with jpeg fallback

Behold the Power of WebP

If the below image has “webp” in the corner your browser can display WebP. If it has “jpeg” it is because your browser cannot show WebP images but the user experience remains the same. webp is a new image format pioneered by Google based on the VP8 video codec to reduce the download size of images on the web. What I am presenting is a way to offer WebP images to browsers that support them while falling back to jpegs so that visitors still have the same user experience.

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Install X11 on OS X 10.4 Tiger Without the Install DVD

I’m always surprised how hard it is to install standard open source packages on OS X and X11 is no different. Installing it on 10.4 is virtually impossible without the original installation DVD which I never have handy. I got this from James Martin but thought it needed an extra mirror because it was painfully slow downloading it from there. Here it is for your convenience.
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Eshop Authorize.net AIM Integration

Eshop is a nice ecommerce plugin for WordPress but it does not support taking credit card information directly on the site but redirects the customer to Authorize.net site or Paypal or some other online payment processing. I had a need to accept cards without redirecting the customer to a external site so I wrote a patch for Eshop. Download patch here

UPDATE: Eshop Plugin has been discontinued. I recommend WooCommerce Instead.

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Superfast embedded fonts with @font-face

Now that font embedding is supported in all major browsers it has become increasingly common thanks to the bulletproof embedding technique for programmers. However embedded fonts can add several milliseconds if not whole seconds and can even block rendering if not done correctly. Here you will find how to mitigate the performance implications if not eliminate them completely.

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Bulletproof and fast css gradients

I am daring to claim that I have found the best bulletproof way to create css3 background gradients. It is the best because it guarantees that extra http requests are not made unless needed and bulletproof because it works in every browser falling back to a normal background-image based gradient if necessary.

UPDATE: Added new rules for IE10 and Opera 11.10!
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