Ring Of Blogs

I saw a few people looking for solutions to off-load wpmu files to Amazon-S3 service. This is something we wanted to try on our installation (just a few thousand blogs) so I wrote a plugin that will serve themes css and image files from S3.

The plugin uses the ‘stylesheet_directory_uri‘ filter to set the stylesheet uri (css file). In turn, the stylesheet uses the ‘url‘ method to call the image files of the theme so they get the same base url as the stylesheet. Most themes uses the ‘stylesheet_directory‘ call correctly so you will not run into trouble but if a theme uses it to call a php file you should change the call to use ‘template_directory‘.

Download: themes-s3.zip

Usage:

1. Signup for an Amazon-S3 account.
2. Create a bucket for your files. Since you have to select a globally unique name for your buckets I call it s3.domain.com were domain.com is my wpmu installation.
3. To point s3 to your bucket setup a CNAME record: s3 -> s3.domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com. (don’t forget that extra dot at the end).
4. Load your themes css and image files to your bucket keeping the exact directory structure for each theme (/wp-contents/themes/… ). You can use the excellent S3 FireFox Organizer to mange your files.
5. Edit the plugin to include your bucket name.
6. Place the plugin in the mu-plugins directory.
7. Test, test and test all your themes!

Whats next? The next step I’m planning is to off-load the Java Scripts in the wp-includes folder. Also planned is an option to serve the users files from S3. If you are interested in helping in any way please leave a comment and we can take it from there.

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