Domain Mapping shows CPanel welcome page

What are you trying to do?

You need a domain for the main site.

If you are on a shared IP address, that doesn’t matter for the domain mapping plugin to work.

You can’t map a domain to the main blog anyway.

You need to have multsite worked AND the subdomain blogs working (since you said you did the wildcard reocrd) before you can even think of messing aroudn with domain mapping.

Ah, sorry I was unclear. I tend to get so focused on a problem that I leave out background info. There is a domain for the main site, which is accessible though mainsite.com or IP.ADD.RE.SS/~user. I’m trying to map a domain to another site on the main installation.

But your response may have clued me in to what is wrong. I have my install set up to make new sites in subfolders, not subdomains. Is it necessary to have subdomains for the Domain Mapping Plugin to work? If so, is there any way to change that preference after wordpress has been installed?

Thanks

Is it necessary to have subdomains for the Domain Mapping Plugin to work?

No, it is not. If you have a subfolder setup, you do not need the wildcard subdomain for any reason at all.

It *is* necessary to tell the webser at your IP where to send the domain though. ?? that’s the bit you missed.

Between the A record to your shared IP, and mapping the domain in the backend of wordpress, you have to go into cpanel & say “park a domain” and list the domain you want to map. As long as your wordpress install is the main domain on the account.

Oh dear, I’m not doing a very good job at this. I had already parked the domain through CPanel as well. Let me go through what I have done, so I don’t keep making you run around anymore.

First, I moved the domain_mapping.php file to ./plugins/, then the sunrise.php file to /wp-content/. Then I added define( ‘SUNRISE’, ‘on’ ); to config.php.

At this point I emailed my webhost asking them to add a wildcard subdomain/virtual host record to my site’s DNS record in Web Host Manager as it says at the bottom of the installation instructions on the plugin page (however, rereading that after reading your comment, I see I didn’t need to do that).

Next, I went to the backend of my main install, and went to the Domain Mapping tab that had just appeared. A message popped up saying the tables for Domain Mapping had been created. Here I entered the shared IP that I have, and hit save changes.

I then went into CPanel and parked the domain I wanted to map to the new site on my wordpress install.

Back in the wordpress backend, I went to the Domains tab. I entered the site ID, domain name, and left Primary checked. That was saved, and showed up on the sites tab.

As far as I know, this was all I was supposed to do, and it is everything I did (I double checked while writing this post). But visiting the domain name I mapped to the new site shows the CPanel welcome page.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I thank you for your patience and knowledge.

……OK, I’m an idiot.
I mean, I knew I was an idiot before I posted this, but this just goes to confirm it.

While I was quickly blowing through the steps earlier, I went to check if it was working yet, and was shown the CPanel welcome page. Firefox cached that page, and showed it to me again when I went back to it.

The short answer is: it works, and always remember to reload the page.

Thanks again Andrea for helping me work through this.