When using a good PPTP-VPN service your data should be encrypted, it should allow you to bypass ISP firewalls and logs and hide your IP address. The VPN connection is good not only to protect your anonymity but also may help you connect via VOIP where it is blocked to use services such as Skype.

Image by Digital Inspiration

Beside the WordPress usual issues, this year, we are devoting part of the camp to social involvement stuff like non-profit organizations – this should be interesting.

Please help spread the word.

Plugins for WordPress and WordPress MU are very similar but there are a few specific MU commands and plugin placement differences you should consider when creating a plugin for WPMU.

• WordPress MU plugins can either be globally enabled or individually enabled/disabled by each user, depending on their purpose.
• WordPress MU will allow you to check if the user is a site admin or not.
• WordPress MU will allow your plugin to use ‘per blog’ settings, or ‘per site’ (sitewide) settings, depending on your needs.
• WordPress MU has variables that are useful to plugin development

Global Plugins
Wordpress MU has a special plugins directory called mu-plugins. Any plugin placed within this directory will automatically be enabled globally. Users cannot disable or view the plugins located here. To ‘disable’ a global plugin, delete the plugin file from your server.

User Enabled Plugins
Plugins that users are allowed to enable/disable for themselves are placed in the standard plugins directory. This would include many of the standard plugin’s that are already available for WordPress. If your plugin will reside here, you can probably follow the standard WordPress plugin development instructions on the codex.

Site Admins
Certain users, (admin by default) can be given the ability to administrate a WPMU installation.

If you want your plugin’s config screen(s) to be available only to WPMU admins, or certain functions only available to admin users, then you can use the following MU functions to test if a user is a site admin or not:

get_currentuserinfo() – get_currentuserinfo requires no arguments and preloads, if not done already, information about, you guessed it, the current user.

is_site_admin() – is_site_admin, as the name implies, will return true if the user is a site admin, and false if they are not.

By using those two functions you can write code or config screens that are admin specific and unavailable to regular users.

Sitewide Settings
WPMU has commands that allow retrieval/storage of global options.

add_site_option($name, $value) – Adds a new sitewide option to the database.

update_site_option($name, $value) – Updates a sitewide option, adds it if it don’t exist.

get_site_option($name) – Retrieves a sitewide option from the database.

WPMU Variables
Many useful variables are available in WordPress MU. Here are a few.

$blog_id
$user_id
$current_site
$current_blog
$wpmuBaseTablePrefix
$table_prefix

Contants
VHOST – yes if installed using sub-domains, no if installed using sub-directories.

More MU Specific Commands
For a full list of all commands specific to WPMU, refer to wpmu-functions.php where you will find they are all defined with self explanatory names, in most cases.

Unfiltered MU gives Administrators and Editors the unfiltered_html capability. This prevents WordPress MU from stripping <iframe>, <embed>, etc. from these users’ posts.
The plugin can either be used globally for your entire MU site, or it can be applied on a blog-by-blog basis.
For WordPress MU only. Regular WordPress already offers this feature and does not need this plugin.

If you want to allow unfiltered html to all users (NOT RECOMMENDED) drop the plugin in the mu-plugins directory. To allow it just for certain blogs place the plugin in the plugins directory and enable it on per-blog basis.