UnnumberedT

Sigh. This is actually a repeat of a question I asked years ago. I just forgot all about it. The solution is to go to my web host, and add the new subdomain to the list of parked domains.

All good now.

Hoo ha! That’s it!

I want to offer very mild criticism of LunarPages, as that cPanel documentation is a little misleading. But in the end, it all seems to work. So I need to apologize a bit. I’ve been grumpy, cause I feel serious time pressure, but both LunarPages and the folks here have been patient and helpful. I think it’s now all setup, and ready for me to start on the content. Thanks!

You did tell me many things, but it’s taken a while to absorb. I was coming from a point of vast ignorance, and while I thought I understood what was going on, I didn’t. I’m sorry about that, but I appreciate your persistance.

Unfortunately, that wiki page lies. I don’t have all of those options. My subdomain cPanel looks like this (jpg):

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Hoxcl5zTEteGcwbHJNUG1yZzg/edit?usp=sharing

So I can add subdomains, and delete subdomains, but nothing more. I’ve put in a support request to LunarPages to get this improved. They’ve asked for 24 hours. And I admit they’ve been pretty friendly with my other requests this past week. So I’ll give them the 24 hours, then consider migrating elsewhere, as I’ve got a deadline coming. If this doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll move to DreamHost …

It’s pointing to it’s own folder.

LunarPages doesn’t do wildcard subdomains, but it will let you specify particular subdomains, one by one. Since I only want a few, specific, subdomains, I thought this would be fine. Apparently, it’s not. Or at least, not yet.

When you tell LunarPages you want a subdomain, they create a subfolder within public_html. Then, when you type in the address, LunarPages directs you to the contents of that subfolder.

I placed the “Hello World” file in the “fireandflora” subfolder. So the “Hello World” is proof that the subdomain exists, but it’s also proof that there’s a problem. LunarPages handling of the subdomain is not what WordPress expects, and I don’t know how to get the two to work together.

So, it’s not all fixed, but this particular piece of the problem is resolved.

In brief: I did a restore of my website/database, renamed my base-domain as mindfulmammoth.com, then setup subdomain-multisite. The wordpress setup appears working, and I can create new subdomain-sites, but I can’t access any of them. Neither directly nor via WordPress dashboard …

I’m going to post further questions in a new thread.

Mika – thanks for all the advice. If I could mod you up somehow, I would.

Not deep. Quite shallow really. The Fire and Flora website has a medium amount of content. The Mindful Mammoth website has none. I was hoping to set up a solid organizational structure, then add some additional content to both places.

Can I put mindfulmammoth in its own folder? Probably. I’m not clear on what you mean. Do you mean a separate installation of WordPress in a separate folder? If so, then yes. That’s easy. It’s just that it creates potential complexities for potential users. In my wild dreams, I have people who visit this site and comment on my works in progress, and I’d like to have a unified login, one that works across all the projects, so that one login will let you contribute to the discussion on any of the project sites.

I did go ahead and search around on this topic. There are several pages with instructions on how to change the primary domain of multi site wordpress. I tried using the ones here:
https://www.wordpress-website.org/change-primary-domain-wordpress-multisite-network/
With no success. It just ended up kind of mangled. Some content disappeared, some parts of the control panel worked, some didn’t. I’ve got backups, so it’ll be OK.

I’m planning to try again tomorrow. I have two other ideas.

1) Try to change the primary domain on the multi-site install using a different recipe. Namely, this one:
https://support.wpengine.com/how-to-change-a-multi-site-primary-domain/

2) Use backups to revert to single-site WordPress (only three days back), changing the domain on that to MindfulMammoth, then updating to multi-site WordPress. That would get the primary domain where I want it. I could then create a Fire and Flora subdomain, copy over the Fire and Flora content to that subdomain, and put fresh content on the MindfulMammoth base domain. Copying content would be time consuming and painful (a day? less?), but it appears straightforward.

Mika – I’m glad to hear this can be done. However, there’s a wrinkle. I made it about half way through your instructions, and realized that I was ending up with not-quite what I’d wanted. The domain names were backwards.

I’ve got a multi-site install, but it’s using fireandflora as the base domain, and I’d like mindfulmammoth to be the base domain. My company is “Mindful Mammoth”, and “Fire and Flora” is my first product. So I’d like to have domain names like :
home.mindfulmammoth.com
fireandflora.mindfulmammoth.com
{otherproduct}.mindfulmammoth.com

Now that I’ve started down this path, can I do something to change the base domain name from fireandflora.com to mindfulmammoth.com? I notice there is a line in wp-config.php which says:
define(‘DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE’, ‘fireandflora.com’);

but I hesitate to change it without understanding dependencies.

Could you advise me on this?

Thanks Sophie. I’ve killed the transparency, so it’s easier to read the words. I hesitate to remove the background alltogether. Just because I personally like it. But i’ll consider it, since both you and pbadmin recommended it.

I honestly thought the top image, the one of kids, was pretty exciting, just because they looked active and excited. Though I agree the second one is fairly boring. Maybe I’ll drop that one.

Message. Yup. There’s so many things I want to get across it’s hard to focus. Maybe I’ll add a “support me” button instead of the second picture. That would make my goal clear, but still include some decent photos of the game in action.

Cards. Yup. There’s some on the Facebook page, and on the Blog, but not upfront. I’ll fix that.

) The title of the page is inaccurate. When I first looked at the site, my first feeling was one of surprise, because the content on the site didn’t match the title. You’re not advertising an “Online Bible” but an “Online Bible Dictionary”.

) I suggest you get a more custom/appropriate web address. ‘customonlinefree’ is so broad that it is meaningless.

) Is your site powered by WordPress? If so, it is bad form to remove the “Powered by WordPress” note from the footer.

) The writing is awkward, sometimes so awkward that I couldn’t understand your meaning. If I was a random internet user, the nature of the writing would make me worry that this was a scam. Was the text, perhaps, written by a nonnative English speaker? Either way, I suggest you find an editor, someone who is a native English speaker, to fix some of the wording problems.

)Overall, I’m not sure what’s going on with the site. What do you want out of it? Why are you doing this? Figure out what you want, then make the site serve that purpose.

I agree. I like it a lot. It’s straightforward and well organized. It gives an impression of professionalism, competency, and no-games. I like the symmetry of the menu bar on the top-right and bottom-left.

My concern would be that it takes an unusually long time to load, like ten seconds. I started to wonder if there was something wrong with it. I think it would work better if you could initially load just 1-2 screens worth of content, and load the rest only as needed. I don’t know what sort of engineering would make that happen, but I do think a faster load time would be to your benefit.

It might be a little big. But I think top-left is a good alignment. With that position, it’s the first thing that most people will see. Especially if you’re going to split your header space, and have both a logo and an ad, then I think the logo should go left, and the ad should go right, which is the way you have it now.

That did the trick. Thanks much!

I reduced height to 19, and that made it a bit better. If height is less than that, then the bottom of the button gets cut off.

This seems awfully fiddly. Is there not a way to say ‘fit to size of button’?

That improves the situation, but doesn’t completely fix the problem.

I’m using a child of Twenty Twelve, but with just two small changes: I tweaked the image behavior so that I could remove the drop-shadows, and added transparency to the page-body-background.

I added a margin statement to the iframe like so:

<iframe style="border: none; overflow: hidden; width: 90px; height: 21px; margin:0" src="//www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffireandflora&send=false&layout=button_count&width=90&show_faces=true&font&colorscheme=light&action=like&height=21" height="240" width="320" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

but the widget still sits a bit above where I expect.

I added a marginheight modifier like so:
<iframe marginheight="0px" style="border: none; overflow: hidden; width: 90px; height: 21px; margin:0" src="//www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffireandflora&send=false&layout=button_count&width=90&show_faces=true&font&colorscheme=light&action=like&height=21" height="240" width="320" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

but that didn’t result in any additional improvement.

Could there be other tags/parameters I’m missing?