Setting up WordPress Multi-Site
By Joe Gardiner Monday, 9th August 2010
Dashboard configuration
Now that the plugin has ben uploaded, head to your WordPress dashboard, but make sure you are in the dashboard for the original WordPress site, not the test site we just created. This is very important as many changes are local to the site dashboard you make changes in, for example you can activate a plugin in one site and it will remain deactivated in another! To change between sites look for the Dashboard tab in the left sidebar and select My Sites.
You can now switch between dashboards using this control panel by selecting the “Dashboard” sub-nav under the site name.
Make sure you are in the original sites dashboard, in my case the site named “Customer”, or the name you gave your site during the WordPress installation process. Have a look down the left sidebar and find the Plugins tab. Select Plugins under the Plugins tab to display a list of the currently available plugins to this WordPress install.
Click Activate under the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to activate the plugin and enable Doamin Mapping functionality in your Super Admin panel. Now if you look over the left sidebar under the Super Admin tab, two new options have been added, Domain Mapping, and Domains.
Click the Domains link to take you through to the Domain mapping panel. Now, do you remember taking down the Site ID number when you created the test1 site? If you have forgotten it or didn’t write it down you can click the Sites button in the Super Admin panel to find it again. If you have your Site ID to hand type it in the Site ID text box.
In the Domain text box enter the domain name you have purchased, e.g. joegardiner.co.uk that you want to direct visitors to the test site we created. You can leave the Primary box ticked.
Now all this information has been entered you can click save.
Pointing your domain
Now that WordPress has been configured to direct my domain, joegardiner.co.uk to the test1 site, I need to change my domain settings to point at my vCluster and the WordPress install. The following instructions may vary depending on who you bought your domain from, but the principle is the same.
Head over to the CatN control panel, https://passport.fubra.com/site/cat/login/, and find the Settings page for your vCluster. If you have difficulties take a look at the Quick Start Guide. On the settings page for your vCluster you can find your Public IP address. Mine is: 87.124.84.82, take a note of yours and copy and paste it from the Settings page to a text file.
Now head over to the company you bought your domain name from. I bought mine from LivetoDot, so will be using their control panel in the next few steps. The exact process may differ but the records we’re changing are the same with any domain name provider.
You need to find the DNS settings for you domain name, and within the DNS settings there should be an Address (A) records panel…
In the Address (A) Settings panel, past you Public IP address from the CatN control panel into the www hostname IP address text box, and the empty hostname text box if there is one. This will direct traffic to my vCluster IP for joegardiner.co.uk and www.joegardiner.co.uk.
It may take a few minutes for you Address (A) record to update so be patient, and after a while try typing your domain name, e.g. joegardiner.co.uk into your web browser to see where it takes you.
As you can see from my last screen, the domain joegardiner.co.uk is successfully directing to my main WordPress installs IP address which is then mapping the domain to my test1 Multi-site! Success!
This process can be repeated as many times as you want by simply creating a site, remembering its ID and mapping a domain name to the site ID. Then you just point your domain names Address (A) record at your vCluster IP for successful domain mapping.
If you run into any difficulties following this guide, please comment and I’ll do my best to help you!
Sources
WordPress Codex: Migrating Multiple Blogs into WordPress 3.0 Multisite
WordPress Codex: Create A Network
Interconnect it: WordPress 3.0 Multisite With Multiple Domains Setup
Posted in Guides, Wordpress |
5 Comments » 
Hi
Thanks for writing this guide and making it easy to understand by providing reader those screen captured. I am still facing some issue. So might need some advice from you.
FYI, I am running a shared web hosting with hostgator. And i have no problem following all your steps but i need to ask a few questions to see where i have gone wrong…
1) Under Supper Admin > Domain Mapping, do i need to enter the ip address of my server where my main blog is installed? or i just leave this section as default?
2) My main blog is house881.com and my sub-domain blog is namlongseeds.house881.com. And under my root directory i have a folder for house881.com and also a folder for namlongseeds.com. Take note both house881.com and namlongseeds.com is on the same level.(under root directory)
My question is, do i need a htaccess file under the folder for namlongseeds.com? If yes, do you know what is the code required.
3) previously before i did the domain mapping, i actually use redirection instead. so i use the .htaccess file to do the re-direction. below is the code used:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^namlongseeds.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://namlongseeds.house881.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.namlongseeds.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://namlongseeds.house881.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
My question is, if i follow your guide, am i right to say that there is no need for me to do re-direction on my webhosting anymore since the mapping is done using the plugin available in wp? If i am correct above, so am i right to say the above code in .htaccess is no longer needed?
The reason why i am asking the above questions is because after applying your steps and removing the .htaccess, i got this errror page:
Index of /
Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at http://www.namlongseeds.com Port 80
Would appreciate your kind advice. Thanks.
Sean
Hi Sean,
1) You can leave this field as the default.
2) You do not need an .htaccess file in each of these folders, only in your root directory. However, my guide suggests you let WordPress handle sub-domains instead of mapping on a sub-domain you have created manually. I do suggest following this advice if you intend on creating a large network in WordPress, as the domain plugin will easily allow you to map domains quickly and simply, and mapping to domains created manually require .htaccess configuration, not covered in this guide.
3) If you use the WP plugin for domain mapping to sites within your network then the .htaccess sample in the guide will work successfully, provided you use your Private IP from HostGator.
There is a difference between the subdomains created by WordPress when you make a new site in your WP network, and the sub-domains you can create manually in your HostGator filesystem. It is important these two methods do not get confused. The network in this guide was created with WordPress in the root directory.
I hope that has helped.
Hi
Joe, thanks for your explanation. I have got it working. My mistake was that my new domain directory is not pointing to the root directory where my wordpress is installed. Once i changed that, it works!
But the images on all my post is not appearing. (show a small cross instead of the image) FYI, I have selected the default setting for my permalinks settings. Not sure if you can advice what could be the issue?
Thanks.
Sean
Hi Sean,
Glad to hear that helped.
There could be a few reasons you are having problems. Try to not use full urls, for example:
<img src=’http://www.yoursite.com/images/Logo.png’>.Use this instead:
<img src=’<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’);?>/images/Logo.png’>to make the image location relative to your stylesheet.
Thanks
Joe
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