okay – i’ll take a stab at it as i’ve been testing both and took me some time to get my head around them … my sense is that both of these are GUI wrappers around core network functions … i say this because first i installed wp-multi-network and had issues … so then i deactivated and turned on networks-for-wordpress and tried my steps again but this plugin had tooltips that gave me some clues about the errors of my ways in previous plugin … plus this plugin also has a nifty little “check / test” function that allowed me to test the vars i entered to see if i got a green light … once i figured it out (parking domains within networks of networks that is on a multisite wp network) then i went back and deactivated both plugins … i found that my networks still resolved … now maybe if i waited two days or so to flush DNS cache i might have gotten different result but i don’t think so … it appears that once the network is created, it stays active even if the plugins are deactivate … which kind of makes sense as both of these plugins allow you to move sub sites from one network to another and then delete a network … so then i went back to wp-multi-network and reactivated that to see if it would conflict with the settings i had used with networks-for-wordpress and voila – if found all the same info and honored those networks … hence i thought “okay – this is akin to Justin Tadlock’s Members Plugin where he says it is more of a wrapper / gui for core features burried deep within WP” thus my sense is both of these plugins are similar -> wrappers for core features …
while i’m at it and for what ever its worth dept … i was a bit confused on the whole path thing but essentially both plugins are asking for four pieces of info ->
Network Name:
Network URL and path
Create a Main Site
Main Site Name
and to go back further, here is outline of my success steps ->
a) mothership domain … lets call the WP multisite network mothershipnetwork.com … and lets say i want to create a new newtork on mothershipnetwork.com called snoopy.com and have snoppy.com resolve to that new network within mothershipnetwork.com as it’s own domain plus be the root for any sub sites i might add to snoopy …
– note i am using subfolders and not subdomains but process should be similar …
b) start at server … using cPanel i went to mothershipnetwork.com and parked snoopy.com …
c) then i went to mothershipnetwork.com and used either plugin to create new network with the following settings ->
– Network Name = The I Love Snoopy Network (note it appears regardless of which plugin you use, one cannot change the network name once assigned)
– Network URL = https://snoopy.com and the path is /
– Create a main site = checked
– Main Site Name = Snoopy.com
and voila – new network created that resolves to snoopy.com … then i used either plugin to move sub sites from mothershipnetwork.com over to the snoopy.com network … say one of the sites was called speaks … so then i log out of mothershipnetwork.com and log into snoopy.com/wp-login.php as super admin, give speaks a theme, tweak a tad, and voila – now i have https://snoopy.com/speaks/ as an active sub site on the snoopy.com network which resides on the mothershipnetwork.com core WP multisite network …
hope this helps somebody as it took me longer than i’d care to admit to figure this out … but having figured it out -> Big Kudos to all of those plugin authors for both of these as they ROCK (or at least i think as now i’ve got to test the users, uploads, plugins, etc for thorough road test but so far so great :>)
