fatvegan

I've just been working on adding a few users to WordPress Multisite. It works pretty well. It's a lot more straight forward than the old WPMU. However, it didn't work that easily out of the box where your "network domain" is already a subdomain. I wanted to use wp.footboot.net to manage the network, but WordPress is hoping for a top-level domain. Or rather, a domain to act as the root domain for all the domains in the network. That's fairly sensible, but it wasn't that practical here because there was too much stuff in my top level domain to use that and too many existing blogs setup as subdomains.

So if your network domain is footboot.net then blogs will be at site1.footboot.net etc.

If your network domain is wp.footboot.net then blogs will be at site1.wp.footboot.net

Fortunately it isn't hard to rename blog domains after they are setup. So you can rename your site1.wp.footboot.net to site1.footboot.net. Everything seems to work all happy, until you try to login. WordPress is willing to show you a blog at any domain I think, but cookies are more tricky. The cookie domain for every blog is determined from the network domain. So if your network domain is wp.footboot.net you cannot do any cookie stuff on site1.footboot.net. However, it seems if you set the COOKIE_DOMAIN define in your wp-config.php to the top level domain you can keep the network domain as a subdomain. So far that is working, and I haven't found any other consequences.

I was importing from old blogs and I wanted to rename the blog domain **after** the import so that WordPress would get the media from the old one. When you rename the blog domain all that media will break, but you can rename them with a plugin.

So it's all running sweet now. Much better than the old software (but still surprisingly crap).