Setting Up Wordpress Multisite To Use Multiple Domain Names?

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mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I'm currently tinkering with Wordpress multisite in order to be able to manage multiple sites from a common install. It's one of the features of Movable Type that I really miss ..

From reading the documentation and poking around various articles and the wp-admin settings etc., I've found that I need to install the domain mapping plugin: WordPress › WordPress MU Domain Mapping « WordPress Plugins

But what's confusing me is the addition of new domains to the system

It appears that I need to create a subdomain of my network's main hostname / domain first and then map the actual domain name to it.
Is that correct?

How does that impact SEO etc? ie. will the subdomain "vanish" once I've mapped the actual domain name, or is it likely to appear as a domain alias of some kind?

Any tips or pointers would be appreciated :)
 

GlicIT

New Member
First, set up a wildcard subdomain for the main domain. Then you will be able to create as many new blogs via the WordPress dashboard as you wish. (I am assuming enabling networking for WordPress has been done: Create A Network « WordPress Codex. This only really entails adding a single line to wp-config.php)

Now let's say domain.com is your main blog/site and you have created first.domain.com using the WordPress dashboard. You want first.domain.com to map to michael.com. The trick, on Blacknight shared hosting, is to move michael.com to the same webspace as domain.com - no need to go messing about with DNS records or anything. For other hosting configurations you will need an A record pointing to the IP address of the server the main domain is on.

You can then use the domain mapping plugin to map michael.com to first.domain.com. The subdomain will not vanish from search engines. You could also map thomas.com, mary.com etc to first.domain.com if you wished. Oh, and you cannot map anything to domain.com itself, but then why would you want to.

Bonus tip: You could also use the Multipost MU plugin to publish/modify posts and pages across two or more of the network sites.
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Thanks for the pointers
Due to my rather convoluted setup I'm creating A records for each site I want to add, so I'm doing something like:
Code:
site.mywordpressmultisite.mydomain
The adding a mapping and Apache alias for the actual domain I want to use with it.

The bit that was confusing me was the domain mapping bit, until I realised that it was a combination of Wordpress AND Apache that was doing it (doh!)

I've still got quite a bit to work through, as I want to migrate several sites from an old MovableType install into a Wordpress multisite one ..

From reading a bit it sounds like some of the plugins / themes aren't compatible, so I guess there'll be quite a bit of trial and error
 
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