WordPress multisite structure

  • Resolved andrewpaulbowden

    (@andrewpaulbowden)


    11 years, 7 months ago

    Hello all

    I’m relatively new to WordPress and am looking to migrate a site to it using Multisite functionality. However I keep hitting a bit of a brick wall in terms of site structure, and I’m hoping someone will be able to give me some advice.

    The website I’m migrating is in Movable Type. There’s basically two “sites” in there – one which publishes to “/”, and another that publishes to “/blog/”. “/blog/” is – natutally – the blog and has a seperate theme and permalink structure to “/” which is the main site.

    I have redone the themes, am able to import the content and am generally happy but I have one problem – getting everything organised in WordPress Multisite.

    The first, obvious problem is that site1 in WordPress reserves /blog/ as a path. But if I put site 2 as “/” the admin interface breaks for me because both site 1 and site 2 are looking in the same place.

    Alternatively if I put “/” as site 1, then I can’t use “/blog” for the blog! [I did eventually work out how to remove the /blog/ from site 1’s permalinks!]

    My question is (basically) is there a way to structure my network so that I don’t have to change all the Blog URLs from /blog/ to something else? After all, Blog that doesn’t sit at https://site.com/blog/ is a bit weird!

    I actually have a second website of almost indentical configuration that I need to do next so this is a bit of a blocker for me!

    Any help and suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    The website I’m migrating is in Movable Type. There’s basically two “sites” in there – one which publishes to “/”, and another that publishes to “/blog/”. “/blog/” is – natutally – the blog and has a seperate theme and permalink structure to “/” which is the main site.

    You’re going to have a major issue here.

    WP uses ‘blog’ already in Multisite.

    your main site doesn’t post to /, it posts to /blog/ instead, so … you don’t get both :/

    Thread Starter andrewpaulbowden

    (@andrewpaulbowden)

    Has to be said, that when people design a system like this and hardcode something like that, you’ve made a bad design decision! Such things are not good. It’s the one thing I will miss about Movable Type – you can put things anywhere. Want your feeds in /ziggle/tron/ping/ directory? It’s all yours! The fact that WordPress hardcodes and mandates so much is a bit infuriating in comparison.

    Still in my adventures with WordPress, I’ve found that many such things can be got round if you’re prepared to dig deep and mess around. I was rather hoping that this would be one of them – especially as it is possible to post the main site out of /blog/.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Yes, it’s not a good decision decision, BUT it’s needed because of file collisions.

    Example:

    You set your URLs to be /%postname%/ and you make a post on your main site called foobar, then the URL is example.com/foobar

    Bob comes along and makes a BLOG called foobar. It’s URL is example.com/foobar

    … Uh Whoops. Which page will WP serve?

    tl;dr – If you use SubFOLDERs, this is what you get. You CAN remove it, but it’s risky, and you still can’t make a subsite called ‘blog’ because it’s a restricted name to prevent those collisions.

    Thread Starter andrewpaulbowden

    (@andrewpaulbowden)

    You’ll get no argument from me about collisions.

    But it is a fundamental failing of WordPress that it hardcodes /blog to site 1. Far better to put that in to a variable (I see someone even went to the extent of submitting a patch to do exactly that for v3, which didn’t seem to be picked up) and let the developer decide.

    I had hoped there’d be something I can do with the database to get round it, but the more I dig the more it is clear that this is simply a system design failure. Given the many support threads I’ve found on this issue, it’s one I wish someone would bother to address!

    Oh well. Crappy non-sensical blog URLs for my users it is! At least my testing has revealed that I can redirect my old MT webpages from /blog to /newblog without causing admin interface conflicts!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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