mattpickus

Thanks for the replies. I don’t think the widget idea works because I don’t want static text, I want it to be dynamic but linked to another place. For example, the footers of my sites contain the usual “terms of service” and “privacy policy” stuff, but it all links off of one site. If I change the master site, all the others update as well as they contain just links.

The improved-include page plugin might work, I will give that a try.

I had the same problem and traced it down to the CDN configuration in W3TC. Are you using a mirror server or other CDN to serve up your pages? I was but I mistyped the mirror name in the CDN configuration. Even though it was wrong, I still got a “Test Passed” response from the test button.

The problem is that W3TC is attempting to serve your CSS and such from an non-existent mirror. I draws the page contents from the page cache, but the rest of your theme is missing in action. The other way to discover this is to totally disable all types of caching on W3TC in the General tab and clear the cache. Then reenable each service one by one, clearing the cache and reloading your site each time. While the process of elimination is tedious, eventually you will find the setting that “breaks” your site and then you can figure out how to fix it.

This guide was pretty helpful for me. Once I got it working my site got a 94/100 score, and all of the lost points come from slow loading ads coming from Google and Amazon!

It is also helpful to have both a HOSTS file redirect and to create a virtual host in the Apache configuration. That creates a mirror the structure of your web server’s folders beneath the WWW folder on the local host so that when you are done with development all you need do is to FTP everything under WWW to the root of the server and do an export/import of the SQL.

If anybody ever invents a software that can manage all these things automatically they will become very rich.

Yes, I got that and managed to get it running in WAMP. The host file works great to spoof the domain, the only tweak is that I need to add a line to hosts for each sub-domain (unless you know how to make a wildcard). I tried 127.0.0.1 *.mydomain.com but it bypasses my localhost totally and tried to fetch https://www.mydomain.com from the external server.

Multisite is pretty cool and will save me a lot of work with the network plugin management.

Your “how to install” article on the WP Codex was invaluable!!!

Using the hosts file is s great work around, and one that I am definitely going to try!

I want to create a test bed in WAMP for an installation that will migrate to a subdomain (not subdirectory) environment. The CODEX says:

You cannot choose Sub-domain Install in the following cases:
- WordPress install is in a directory (not in document root).
- "WordPress address (URL)" is localhost.
- "WordPress address (URL)" is IP address such as 127.0.0.1.

I assume that a hosts file deals with the last two issues, but what about the first. I am correct in thinking that the WWW folder in my WAMP install is considered the root? That is how it has been behaving for my stand alone installs so I should install WP directly under WWW?

If I develop like this, am I correct that I can port everything to a hosted server with just these steps:

1. FTP all the necessary files to the host at the same level relative to the root.
2. Tweak the WP-Config to point at the correct SQL server.
3. Export all SQL tables and then import them on the remote host

Is there anything I need to do to my Apache config file on my local box to emulate the wildcard domains?

Sorry for the newbie questions, but I am not that that familiar with UNIX type environments.

Thanks, that was helpful.