Easiest way of setting up a WP MultiSite

  • Resolved maslerdanch

    (@maslerdanch)


    13 years, 4 months ago

    I am looking at building a WP MultiSite for the CMS of an already existing website. before it goes live I was thinking of the best solution to get it up and running with minimal loss of visibility on search engines and downtime.

    I can either

    1. Use Xampp to build a local dev environment and laboriously export and upload to the new site. Any suggestions on how I do this easier greatly accepted.

    or

    2. I buy hosting and build the site online then get the DNS pointed from the old site to the new site and make a few alterations to the code to get it up and running.

    Does anyone have any recommendations or further suggestions as to the best and easiest way to do this.

    thanks in advance

    Sam

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Moving to MultiSite, first off ??

    Turning on MultiSite, in and off itself, is pretty painless. You can test it once locally and then do it for realz on your real site.

    But you mention ‘buy hosting’ which confuses me. Is the site already on WP?

    Thread Starter maslerdanch

    (@maslerdanch)

    hi Ipstenu & Thanks

    It’s not WP already it’s html and in a mess.

    I have designed a good theme in the style of the original site and updated it for WP. There are many separate sections of the site, different themes, menus and colours that will have separate users for each section. I wanted to use WP as it needs to be easy for the users to change/update pages as they’re not that savvy.

    I was thinking of building it live on another url whilst the old site continues to run in it’s current form the switch the dns when ready.

    or

    build it on xampp locally then upload it.

    maslerdanch

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Ah okay ??

    The problem is that MultiSite is a stone cold mother to move. I mean, I did it once, with 400 users, and I wanted to rip my eyeballs out. And I’m pretty good at doing a lot of things with WordPress. It’s, in part, because of how the domainname is saved all over the database. WHen you search/replace it, you run the risk of buggering any serializations (i.e. if olddomain.com is a different character length than thisismynewdomain.com, you’ll break stuff in weird ways).

    Is it possible to convert SOME of the site to WordPress (not MultiSite) — like the main front stuff? — and then make it live and start rolling out MultiSite subsites in place?

    Thread Starter maslerdanch

    (@maslerdanch)

    I could build the basic setup with just the main front end and only a Super Admin. Then transfer it to a clean install of WP Multisite on the old site, after that key in all the users and iron out any problems.

    Is it possible to run it on a testing server as myoldsite.com then maybe it wont have too many errors to fix!?

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Re-read what I said about changing domains.

    You’d be far less riskier to install in locally and make a fake domain like yourrealdomain.loc – That way all you have to change is the .loc to .com and no serialization risks!

    Thread Starter maslerdanch

    (@maslerdanch)

    Done and currently setting up – Thanks!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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