New blog post on multisite subdomain gives 404 error. Ok on main site.

Hi Again, I was wondering how you were doing with this project…

Anyway, since the posts are going to be different as translated you can’t share the posts part of the database between the two ‘sites’ so my suggestion is to use something like Syndicate Out to copy the post over to the translated site. There are some warnings about the plugin being dated and possibly not working but that’s the breaks here.

Try it and see… and if it does work then report back to the plugin page to let others know. WordPress version and type might really help the next guy.

Syndicate out will copy the posts but the directory structures will probably be out of sync. You could then maybe sync everything manually. https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-create-custom-permalinks-in-wordpress/. I’m hoping after a time the ‘slug portion’ will sync on its own following the Pretty Permalinks between the sites.

You could then use a translation plugin to translate the article and then do the manual translation as I think your aim was anyway. Internal links are still a problem but a search and replace might be implemented to add the subdirectory to the domain name within the articles.

Another option is to manually copy over the two database tables to get a ‘running start’ then invoke the Syndicate Out after that. What would really be nice is if the two databases had the same numeric data and then the slugs matched to build the permalinks with those. That would probably be too much to ask though of that plugin and I’m not sure XML RPC would handle that.

Another option would be to import using Feed WordPress and making use of the little button on the edit screen to stop Feed WordPress from overwriting your manual edits and the translations. The problem with that is you’ll need to allow full articles in your RSS feed which I don’t normally recommend.

Another thought might be to share the two posts database tables to an intermediate site ‘on your multisite’ that isn’t public where you could allow the full RSS feed for the Feed WordPress. This is starting to be a Kludge but might be the way to make this work.

There’s also the CLI which might get you there.

Some of my sites actually run intermediate WordPress sites to offload some tasks. It’s a real boon to heavily loaded sites.

Hi again @jnashhawkins,
I am making progress but it is slow and frustrating and at every stop something goes wrong. ??

However I have good news, I have cracked this last problem.

I noticed that in fact ALL of the blog articles on the subdomain site gave 404 errors when you tried to click through to the page, even though the previews are visible on the front page and also on the blog page. So I thought there must be a problem with the way the blog was cloned, the page urls were updated with the domain but not the blog urls.

In the dashboard I changed the domaine to en1 and saved, and all the blog posts suddenly worked, not 404. Switched back to en and they still work. Just needed a manual update to fix the domain, apparently.

Thanks for all your suggestions but I think they might have been too complex for my needs ; if the translation plugin I am using did not work I would just skip it and do manual translation… the plugin just makes things easier because it provides an interface to translate each article in the same page I am writing the original one and copies all the content automatically; then I do the translation myself manually (machine translation is still pretty unreliable).

Now I just have have to modify my dns settings to map the original domain to the new site, and then a few little cosmetic tweaks and it will FINALLY be done except for the actual translation work…

Thanks again for all your patience and help !!

PS I am going to delete all my “test” pages / blog posts from the site, so they will definitely give a 404 error now, but you can access the real blog posts to check.