I’ve been looking for a way to simplify the process of setting up new websites. Wordpress does a great job in that the install process is quite simple and I can get one up and running in about 10 minutes. The trouble is whenever there is an update, I have to go to all my sites and manually upgrade them all (Fantastico does a great job of this but my web host is a bit slow in updating their wordpress versions in fantastico.)
Enter Wordpress MU (multi user). This is basically the version user on Wordpress.com where millions of people have their blogs hosted. It is absolutely amazing that these guys have released it open source for general public use. The best thing about this is that everything is on one database, and one code set - ie. I will only need to update it once when there is a new version.
However, by the default, wordpress mu only works on subdirectories (ie. domain.com/blog1) or subdomains (ie. blog1.domain.com) so a little tweaking needs to be done in order to get it to host different domains (eg. blog1.com, blog2.com, blog3.com, etc.). As is customary for wordpress, everything has a plugin already developed. In this case, you need to down the multi-site plugin for wordpress mu. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no documentation that comes with this - they don’t even tell you were to upload the plugin! Hopefully, the rest of this post will help other people out so they didn’t have to go through all the trial and errors that I went through.
Installing Wordpress MU:
- Download the latest version from mu.wordpress.org
- Upload it to the root of your public_html or www domain directory. I’m guess you should also be able to put this in a subdirectory (eg. domain.com/wpmu) but since it’s going to host a ton of other domains, lets put it in the root so we don’t over complicate things.
- Create a new database (eg. wpmu). Most people have cpanel so this is done via the MySQL databases link in the cpanel admin page. You will most likely be on a shared hosting account so your db will be called something like username_wpmu.
- Create a database user for wordpress to use. Most people will call it the same as the db name so it is easy to match them up. Remember to add the user to the db and grant all permissions.
- Try to access your domain in the web browser. The wordpress mu install page will come up and tell you what is missing. This will be stuff like changing the permissions of some files, giving it the access rights to the database, etc. It’s pretty self explanatory and I didn’t have any problems at all.
Installing Multisite Manager
- Download the latest plugin from http://wpmudev.org/project/Multi-Site-Manager
- Uncompress the file and upload it to the wp-content/mu-plugins directory
- That’s it. You should now be able to log into your wp-admin and see a ’sites’ page in your site admin screen.
Adding a new site
- Firstly, you need to add the domain to your hosting account. Log into your cpanel and add a parked domain.
( Obviously, you need to also make sure your domain is using your hosts nameservers at your domain registrar. )
- Now here’s where the money is. Instead of adding a new blog, you go to the site admin and add a new site (ie. your new domain)
- Apart from the new domain name (use domain.com, instead of www.domain.com!) , I’ve circled all the bits you need to fill in.
- Path: You can’t leave this blank. Put in a slash
- Clone Site. You MUST select your main domain to clone. This is so that every site can have it’s own site admin and be able to manage the themes and plugins.
- Leave everything ticked (selected) but also check the site name and illegal names boxes. ( It doesn’t seem to work properly without these cloned. )
- You should now be able to log into the wp-admin of your new domain. (ie. newdomain.com/wp-admin)
- Once logged in, go to the Options menu and update your Site Name and tag line
- Also go to the Presentation menu and pick the theme that you want the new site to use. If the theme isn’t there you will need to go to the Site Admin menu and enable to theme.
- That’s it. You’re ready to go. All the other menus are the same as the ordinary wordpress.
Once you have Wordpress mu setup, you basically have your own domain ‘parking’. I have a theme fully loaded with adsense and every time I have register a new domain, I just ‘park’ it and it’s ready to go. This is sooo much better than those traditional parking companies. It’s almost like parking on steroids because I can put whatever I want on the site, I can build as many backlinks as I want, and it will almost definitely get indexed by google.
Parking domains with wordpress mu is what I do now for all my domains until I find the time to build them into a proper site. It’s working really well because now I’m not missing out on any money by having domains sitting empty. Check out SEOpinions and Media Leaks as examples. They’re both running off FreeServing.com but they are functioning as completely separate installations! Thank you Wordpress!!
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Tags: domain parking, multisite manager, wordpress mu
18 comments ↓
I’ve been looking to move my blog network to WP-MU for the past two days, and have had no luck getting it to work with domains, since there was no documentation for the site manager plugin. After I followed your directions, it worked perfectly! Thank you! Funny to see you just posted this yesterday.
I’m on MediaTemple, and used symlinks to point one domain to another, since MT doesn’t have a parking tool. I just typed
ln -s mywpmudomain.com myothernewblog.com
on the command line after setting up hosting, and that did it.
wow. didn’t expect it to be found so fast. Glad it helped someone already! :)
[…] « Multisite Manager with Wordpress MU 01 02 2008 […]
[…] I didn’t just want to setup a Wordpress Multiuser site. I also wanted to be able to use multiple domains. Here’s the plugin to make that happen. Setting up the multi site manager plugin might not be obvious. Here’s some more information about the plugin. […]
I’ve been looking for this for months… thanks!
Hi, please also CC my email if you respond to this note. You don’t seem to have comment subscription on.
I want exactly this for my Cpanel/WHM thing. My main apache htdocs is something like “/usr/local/apache/htdocs” but as you know the cpanel domains are all VirtualHosts with their own directories like
/home/domain1/public_html
/home/domain2/public_html
And so on. Each domain user is banned from seeing the directory structure of another domain through “OpenDir” protection.
What I want to do:
1. Setup WP or WPMU so that I maintain only ONE install.
2. Run different domains from it, as you seem to explain so well.
3. I want all domains to have access to all the plugins in my WPMU install, but not all plugins will be activated for every domain. Plugin activation may vary domain by domain.
4. Data of all of these folks should go into the same database.
5. WP-SuperCache should cache locally within the directory structure of THAT domain.
6. They can have access to all themes, but the theme for each domain will be different. So I want to be able to have different styles etc, pointing to files in those specific locations within the /home/ directory of every individuaul WP install.
So my questions:
1. Can the MultiSiteManager (MSM) plugin handle these scenarios.
2. I notice from the Sitemap post that we change some inline code. Will this break when WPMU is updated next time??
Thanks so much for taking the time to share all this VERY useful insight !
Hi Erick,
1. for WPMU to handle multiple domains, they all need to point to a main domain. So all my are on /home/freeserving.com/public_html. All my parked domains point to this directory. WPMU will need detect what domain is being used to access it to determine which blog to show up. Each blog has their own contents directory in blogs.dir/
2. the code that i modified was the sitemap plugin which is in its own plugins directory. This will not affect WPMU at all. I really should package it up to its own wpmu_sitemaps bundle :)
I’ve never bothered with comment subscription but might reconsider this soon :P
When I enabled site zero and the ‘catch orphaned blogs’ settings I noticed that the domain for site zero is ‘holding.blogs.local’. Is this intentional so that site zero is never reachable or am I supposed to customize this setting to a real domain?
Thanks, Hugh (PS: Please email me if you reply to this comment.)
Hello,
I have a website http://www.hurricanesoftwares.com i am using wordpress standalone for now. But, i am planning to use wordpress MU now. I have a question will search engines treat wordpress blog as one or seperate sub domain blogs will have their own Rankings and Ratings.
e.g.
technology.hurricanesoftwares.com
php.hurricanesoftwares.com
will these be treated separately, in the eye’s of Google or SEO Crawlers?
One more question i have about installing all the necessary plugin’s in one go. Is it possible?
Help me out here please.
Ash
Hugh, looks like David Dean replied back to your question on the wpmudev site. “it is intended to make blogs unreachable while you are moving them. There is no entry in the sites table created for the holding site, so changing it to a real domain would probably not make the held blogs reachable”
Ash, I’ve noticed that google does treat them separately. As for the plugins, you’ll need to download and upload them separately from their individual creators.
Hi Jerry.
Thanks for this tutorial. I searched because I wanted to use the Multi Manager plugin and then saw you are *supporting* it.
I read what they had to say but had no idea until I found your blog. Thanks for sharing.
I have followed the steps but cannot access http://kissonthefirstdate.com/wp-admin/ I think the domain is new and the nameserver not propagated. Because I am getting my main site that I registered with my host instead of the new site I created.
Regards
Johan
Hi Johan, if you can reach your server via your domain, then the domain dns updates from the registrar has already propagated. You probably haven’t added on the domain to your account. If it’s your main wpmu site, then you should choose to add-on a domain from cpanel. If it is your ‘child’ sites, then you should choose to park the domain under your main domain.
[…] you have all of your blogs on the same server, you can use Wordpress MU with the multisite manager plugin and clone sites on the fly. Sites will use plugins from the same folder. One Wordpress upgrade upgrades them all. But all of […]
Hello Jerry, thanks for the greatly helpful tips. I’ve only trouble seeing the screenshots - when I click on a thumbnail, I get to a page like http://www.brilliances.com/multisite-manager-with-wordpress-mu/multisite-add-a-site/ with all but the enlarged screenshot. Why could it be?
Miro
Thanks Miro. Something went amiss when I moved this domain over from my old one. I’ve updated the links in the thumbnails and it should just take you directly to the full jpg now.
Jerry
[…] is not good, but I found I could get by using some helpful tutorials by Richard Bui and Jerry Huang. Wordpress MU has multi-site capability as shipped, but it doesn’t allow you to just park […]
Great write-up! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get themes to work on my additional blogs and didn’t realize I needed to clone my main site for the themes to work!
Thanks for the help!
Thanks you very much for this tutorial. Now I really getting productive with Wordpress MU :)
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