WP Multi-Network lessons learned

  • So as a discussion for folks muscling through all this, know a few things:

    1) The domain name you use to setup your wordpress install (that first blog/network/site)… dont change or use that beyond managing your multi-network install. Just setup a FQDN that you are going to use to manage the thing for its lifetime, and leave that part be.

    The networks you configure under the WP Multi-Network will be much more flexible to do moves/changes around.

    2) Create your users that will be your network (superuser) admins and add them to the site, make a backup admin if you are solo.

    3) User management is at 2 levels, site and network. Users you create at the network can be added to sites, the user DB is common (unless you split things up)

    4) This plugin is exposing functionality ALREADY in wordpress, with a UI to manage things… Its not a bolt on thing that is going away, just how to expose the UI. That UI approach is in arbitration between various groups (see preso by John James Jacoby – https://wordpress.tv/2014/07/26/john-james-jacoby-multisite-and-multi-network/ ) I’ll be going through WPMU’s implementation next in a second hosting footprint I’ve setup to compare.

    Understand when using this; each “network” becomes its own management point for all the “sites” that would be built under it. Sites are children of the parent domain. Each domain is a unique network. You can manage the plugins, admins, and themes for all sites within a network.

    The form of the URL for the site wordpress administration is:

    https://example.com/wp-admin/

    While the URL for the network administration is:

    https://example.com/wp-admin/network/

    There is also a “Network” navigation menu. Note that if you have not added the existing user from the network to the site as an admin, the menu for the network will not show up for that user. That can be very confusing (and why I recommend, add admins to network first, then add existing user to site).

    So in effect you have a network of example.com and elpmaxe.com and sites of example.com, test.example.com, dev.example.com for the first network, and elpmaxe.com, web.elpmaxe.com, app.elpmaxe.com

    example.com <—- Network, no content is associated with this abstract, plugins and network wide management are handled under the “Network
    … example.com <—– Default first site (blog) created upon network creation
    … test.example.com <—- first site created under the network
    … dev.example.com <—- second site created under the network

    Management for this at the network level would be:

    https://example.com/wp-admin/network

    If you are planning on “one site” per “network”, realize that you have a DB layer cleanup coming if you use tools like All-in-One WP Migration (who’s team has been great looking at this with us proactively).

    To deal with this, if I want domain.tld to be the actual site URL, I create a throwaway https://www.domain.tld that will be discarded after importing / converting the testing site export. We have this working now, through a series of post import DB changes and a manual copy of files for media library to a new blog base path.

    The activity I am working through now is the scenario where we have domains that are “development” within the network install, that we want to promote to “production” with change of domain, etc. Effectively a deployment management approach.

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  • First of all, thank you for your tips and lessons learned. Some were new to me, some I also learned the hard way.

    The activity I am working through now is the scenario where we have domains that are “development” within the network install, that we want to promote to “production” with change of domain, etc. Effectively a deployment management approach.

    Am I wrong for thinking that this “promotion” task should be as simple as changing the parent_site_id from the development network site_id to the production network site_id in the WP_Blogs DB table, and then doing a find/replace within other tables to update the old parent_ID to the new parent_ID?????

    Thread Starter agrajagco

    (@agrajagco)

    Yes, and depends, we were taking one completely different domain as a template and generating new sites as dev templates over and over for a common branded set of companies.

    I worked a bit with the WP All in one migration team with their multi-site extension to get it working properly for multi-network between hosting, and same host multi network import as well. All working very well.

    Search/replace worked ok as well but only for when we were dealing with dev domain switch to prod domain.

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