I tried the following HTACCESS and it fixed all these problems with broken or missing images:

#Wordpress Multi site
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 
# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
#END WordPress Multi Site

If you are using The Donncha Domain mapping plugin to allow users to use domain names, make sure to update to the latest version that is compatible with WordPress 3.0.x. Otherwise you could see this message when a blog user tries to login:

“You don’t have permission to view this site. Please contact the system administrator.”

To update to the latest version of Donncha’s domain mapping plugin:

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

If you notice any other issues after updating to WordPress Multisite, let me know and I will see if there is any fix.

Start activating the multi-site features of WordPress 3.0 by adding this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

/** Enable or disable Worpress Multi-site features **/
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Refresh your Dashboard and got to ”Tools -> Network”. You will see a screen that looks similar to the one in the picture below:

If you want to install your additional blogs on virtual sub-domains instead of sub-directories you will need to create a wildcard DNS record on your server to enable the sub-domain (blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, blog3.yourdomain.com) functionality of WordPress 3.0.

Your server must support wildcard DNS records for you to do this. As an example I will explain how to configure it with Hostgator. It’s very easy to do with the Hostgator Baby Plan allows them. When you are in your Hostgator Control Panel, follow these instructions to create a wildcard DNS record for a domain.

Select “sub-domains” under”Domains” in CPanel
Enter an asterisk “*” in the sub-domain’s name field
Select the TLD the wildcard DNS is to be set up on
Enter the server location address for the wildcard folder, e.g. /public_html/bigbuz
Click “Create”
Back to your WordPress admin panel, you need to install the now activated WordPress 3.0 Network settings, viz

Find the Network settings page in your WordPress admin panel (Tools>Network)
Choose whether you want to use sub-domains or sub-folders for the additional blogs
Type a name for your network of sites
Set your admin email address
Click “Install”

After a minute or two you will be presented with a configuration screen. Back up your .htaccess and wp-config.php files before you proceed to follow the instructions provided on that configuration screen.

As a precautionary measure to prevent visitors of non-existent sites from being greeted by 404 error messages, redirect them to a URL of your choice by adding the below code to the bottom your wp-config.php file:

 /* Send visitors to non-existent blogs here */
define( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://yourdomain.com/' );

Change http://yourdomain.com to the URL of your choice

Log out then log back in.
You will now need to go through your settings to enable or disable the new options provided by WordPress Multi Site.

Upgrading from WPMU to WordPress Multisite 3.0

If you are upgrading from WPMU to WordPress Multisite 3.0, you can do it automatically from the dashboard, but some manual configuration is also needed. After you upgrade and you login again into the dashboard, this message will be displayed:

Warning! WordPress encrypts user cookies, but you must add the following lines to wp-config.php for it to be more secure.

Follow the steps listed there and then you could see something like this:

“Thank you for Updating! Please visit the Update Network page to update all your sites.”

Follow the link and update all the blogs. (If you have any). Update Network.

Also you could see the following message:

“The wp-content/blogs.php file is deprecated. Please remove it and update your server rewrite rules to use wp-includes/ms-files.php instead.”

So, just remove the blogs.php file from the server and edit your .htaccess file. The .htaccess file can be found in the root folder, where the wp-config.php file is.

Open with notepad and change:

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]

to

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

Done! Your new Multiuser 3.0 installation is ready to use.

Enjoy!

New features in this WordPress release include a new default theme called “Twenty Ten”. Let me add that it really looks like “Patagonia” Theme, so I guess less people are going to use my theme, time to “adapt and change” I guess. But in the other hand I can feel proud to work as inspiration to whoever designed Twenty Ten.

Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. Also, I really don’t understand why would they merge WpMu into WordPress, since most people are going to use normal WordPress anyways.

Google Search submission URL. Submit here if your site is new and/or still not listed in google. How to know if your site is listed in Google?

Just go to Google and type this in Google Search -> site:your-url.com

1) Google Search submission URL:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

2) Google Blog Search:

Make sure you submit here, because if your site is listed in Google, it doesn’t mean it is listed in the blog search. High quality and when you make a new high quality post, you can also get listed in the top 10 in Google, at the bottom, where it says: “Blog posts about…”

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

3) Bing Search:

Bing was originally known as MSN Search. Microsoft’s official search engine that is here to stay.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

4) Yahoo Site Explorer:

You can submit a webpage or a Site Feed. They can ask you to verify your submission by adding a META tag to your home page, or uploading a verification file to your site. It’s worth it to submit there and take a few minutes to verify it.

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

5) Yahoo RSS submission:

Another great tool from Yahoo to submit your RSS, very useful.

http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/submit

Happy WordPressing everyone!

You can download the RC and test it out if you want, directly from wordpress.org

Some things to take in mind:

_Custom menus are finished! Yay!
_Multi-site is all set.
_There are a ton of changes, so plugin authors, please test your plugins now, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can figure it out before the final release.
_Plugin and theme users are also encouraged to test things out. If you find problems, let your plugin/theme authors know so they can figure out the cause.
_The look of the WordPress admin has been lightened up a little bit, so you can focus more on your content.

Enjoy!

It’s one of the most exciting features in the coming WordPress 3.0. It gives you full control over your site’s navigation menus. Users can easily drag and drop items, to create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories, basically a customized widget. Then you can embed these custom menus as a widget, in the sidebar, footer, etc.

           Download Theme

               Demo Theme

I designed this template in Photoshop, coded and edited it in Dreamweaver and Notepad++. Although this theme is visual attractive (which in many cases means “heavy”) it does not take a lot of resources like some other similar wordpress themes. Most of the visual attractive themes tend to be heavy for your host and slow loading for the user. Most of those themes load a lot of add-ons in their header.php, plus they have a very complex functions.php. I designed Director to be as “lite” as possible, yet visual attractive.

Many more features will be added in the next versions of Director. Some extra features like custom CSS, Analytics, Adsense and more. Custom CSS will let you modify the stylesheet and save the customization, so you don’t lose the changes when you update. Twitter, Facebook and Custom RSS can be added from the theme’s options. Enter the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Director Options. You can also send suggestions here. This WordPress theme will be offered in Spanish (my native language) in the next few versions. Want to translate Director Theme to another language? You can contact me as well and I will add your credit (name and site) to the changelog!

Here are some stats of WpThemesPlanet first year:

20,000 downloads of Patagonia and 10,000 of Tandil

100 articles

800 approved comments

12,000 spam comments blocked by Akismet!

300 user Emails received.

450 Support emails sent.

3 Free WordPress Themes and 50 Theme Updates released.

Many theme customizations for clients of Patagonia and Tandil.

I want to thank everyone for using my themes and supporting the project. The first year is hard. Most internet projects collapse during this period. If you manage to survive the first year, you are good to go. During this period, I spent time adding content and supporting users, as well as updating and improving both themes. During the second year I want to take the whole project to the next level. Many good things will follow! Stay tuned!

Finally I want to quote a phrase from Thomas Alva Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Never give up!