How to replace existing website with Multisite?

  • gfaw

    (@gfaw)


    9 years, 10 months ago

    Hello all,

    I need to replace an existing non-Wordpress website with a multisite.

    The purpose for setting up a multisite in this case is requirement for a multilingual website.

    With a conventional WordPress setup, I could develop in a subfolder or even under a dummy URL and later switch to the desired domain fairly easily with a few modifications.

    Problem I figure is, that this doesn’t work in the same way with WordPress multisite. What I did in the past was develop everything locally, then setup the production website, copy files to the server, exported and re-imported the DB, in this way keeping downtime to a minimum.

    Now with this new project, this is not possible as I need to have a beta version online for the customer to see, while the “old” website should remain untouched until the multisite is ready, and then be replaced by it.

    How would I best go about it, as I can obviously not use the URL currently in use by the productive site for the root domain of the multisite.

    What I could do is develop under a different URL – export DB, modify domain and reinsert. However this is somewhat fiddly and I don’t feel comfortable doing this for obvious reasons…

    Any better ideas?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    9 years, 10 months ago

    It does KINDA work the same way in multisite, just the words “fairly easily” aren’t ones that I would use. That said, have you reviewed your other multilinguage methods like qtranslate or WPML?

    Thread Starter gfaw

    (@gfaw)

    9 years, 10 months ago

    Thanks for your comment, I’m running 2 multilingual multisites which I converted to from other solutions.

    Qtranslate would be my choice for simple websites, but it is a pain in the a…. when the site is too complex or grows into such. I used to use it before and it caused me a lot of time to clean it up.

    I also tested WPML. Might be a good plugin, but it is not free and not very time efficient. I used it once on a project, I spent so much time on it.

    I tried babble which was wasn’t all too bad, but I fear backtracking once I went down this road.

    In my mind setting up a multisite is the best and cleanest solution and there’s a really good plugin to it, for linking the different language sites: Multilingual Plugin from Marketpress

    As for the “KINDA” – no. With the multisite it is much more complicated. To change URLs with a default WP-installation you can hardcode the URL in the functions.php, log back in, change the blog address within the settings, delete it from functions.php and you’re done.

    Whereas with a Multisite this doesn’t work, you have to export the db, change it in the export file redo the setup procedure and then re-import the db, as far as my knowledge goes.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    9 years, 10 months ago

    To change URLs with a default WP-installation you can hardcode the URL in the functions.php, log back in, change the blog address within the settings, delete it from functions.php and you’re done.

    You forgot the step that actually is why I hate doing it: editing all the content on all the pages in all the sites to have the right path.

    I would install it in a subdomain and make your setup a subfolder site. Then you just have to run the sql search/replacer here – https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#Moving_WordPress_Multisite

    So all my sites would, for the moment, be beta.example.com/en and so on.

    Thread Starter gfaw

    (@gfaw)

    9 years, 10 months ago

    thanks! that was exactlywhat I was looking for!

    As for the problem with internal links: I use a plugin called “Broken Link Checker”. What’s more, when you use pretty permalinks you don’t need to provide hardlinks, for internal (site-) links, relative links are fine and do solve part of the problem. What left are media library links. Not sure if the Broken Link Checker addresses this problem, too long since it last reported a broken link.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    9 years, 10 months ago

    BLC likes to eat all your memory for lunch. I would never use it. Velvet Blues Update URLs is a better choice.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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