Domain Mapping with External SUBdomains

  • McSalty

    (@mcsalty)


    11 years, 2 months ago

    I’m helping a company migrate their 20 blogs from posterous to wordpress, and I think multisite is ideal for the purpose. However, I’m having trouble figuring out how exactly to set it up with their subdomain structure.

    http://maindomain.com and http://secondarydomain.com are NOT wordpress installs. However, they have blogs set up at

    http://blog.secondarydomain.com
    http://blog-en.maindomain.com
    http://blog-es.maindomain.com
    http://blog-ru.maindomain.com
    … etc. for blogging in various languages.

    Keep in mind all these blogs are already up and running on posterous with a ton of content, and I can’t cause downtime to the blogs. How would you recommend I set this up?

    I’m thinking:
    1) Set up a “setup” subdomain for wordpress multisite, blogsetup.maindomain.com. Set up all the multisite blogs as sub-subdomains, e.g. blog-en.blogsetup.maindomain.com.
    2) Once the content is all imported, use the domain mapping plugin and set the CNAME records of all the subdomains (blog-en.maindomain.com) to point to the sub-subdomains (blog-en.blogsetup.maindomain.com).

    I figure this way I can get the blogs up and running before pointing the domains over, so there won’t be any downtime. My questions are,

    1) Can the domain mapping plugin handle pointing external subdomains to these internal sub-subdomains?
    2) Obviously I don’t want the users to ever see the ugly sub-subdomain address. Does the domain mapping plugin completely hide this?
    3) Is there a smarter way to do this type of setup? 😉

    Thanks a lot for your help.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Yes, yes and maybe.

    Can you install WordPress on maindomain.com right now? If so, I would do this:

    1) Install on maindomain.com
    2) create blo2-en.maindomain.com
    3) Port that over
    4) Rename blo2-en to blog-en in wp-admin/network/sites.php
    4b) search and replace wp_X_posts for blo2-en to blog-en too
    5) turn off blog-en vi posterous

    Move on to the next site.

    OR. If you don’t have a lot of comments, or constant activity, make a local site as maindomain.dev and build it all there. Then search/replace the whole DB for maindomain.dev/maindomain.com and upload it all to your server.

    That will let you test out everything and not add in extra layers of plugins you don’t have to use.

    Thread Starter McSalty

    (@mcsalty)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Thanks for the response. The problem is, maindomain.com is not a wordpress site. However, the blogs are fixed in number and there’s no need to allow users to create new blogs. Thus I was thinking of just manually mapping all of the subdomains so it “looks like” they’re hosted one subdomain.maindomain.com even if wordpress is actually installed in a different location.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Do you want maindomain.com to become WP?

    Thread Starter McSalty

    (@mcsalty)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    No, maindomain.com serves a different purpose and cannot be converted to a wordpress site.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Ick. That’s gonna be a hassle. In theory, yes, you can map them like that. I don’t know how well it’ll work in the real world though :/

    Thread Starter McSalty

    (@mcsalty)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Which part do you think will cause a problem? If the plugin can handle subdomain mapping, then I would think it wouldn’t be too different from a normal multi-site install with multiple external domain names. Just in this case those subdomains are all “children” of a single external domain name.

    Anyway, I suppose I’ll just try it out and see how it goes. I appreciate your input, and if anyone else has any thoughts I’d love to hear them.

    Thread Starter McSalty

    (@mcsalty)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    I also found this guide where the guy is doing something similar – installing wordpress blogs as subdomains on a main domain running on django:
    http://tech.velmont.net/howto-use-subdomain-wordpress-multisite-3-x-3-0-and-3-1-without-dashboard-site/

    But to me it seems more complicated and prone to breaking than simply redirecting the subdomains manually using the domain mapping plugin and CNAME records (since I only need to setup a finite number of subdomains, and then I’m finished with my setup). But someone correct me if I’m wrong.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Well it’s the hassle of having everything in one folder, but mapping ALL of it. it’s just adding extra hurdles, when WP works great like that if it’s in domain.com to start with, no extra work :/ That’s all.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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