How to Activate Multisite and Add Subdomains to WordPress 3

Posted by & filed under Multisite Setup.

Blogs on SubDomains or SubFolders?

This topic could actually be covered in another post, which I think I will. I prefer subdomains. Google seems to like them and 90% of Google’s preferred social networks seem to use subdomains.

1.Setup Up Wildcard Subdomains for WordPress 3

Depending on what type of webserver control panel you use, you may have an easy way of doing the following. But if you don’t and know Linux, you can do the following.

Add this to your httpd.conf file (replacing the domain name, of course):

ServerAlias *.wp23.com

Add an A record to your Bind DNS like so:

A *.wp23.com

2.Edit Your wp-config.php File to Allow Multisite

This file is in the root folder of your WordPress installation. You should see a line like the following near the end:

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Right before that, add this:

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

3. Enable the Network

After you save the following file and go back to your WordPress Admin, you will notice a new menu under “Tools” called “Network”. This is where you finally get to do something that is as easy as, well, WordPress.

If you have an active WordPress 3 installation while you do this and have plugins activated, you will have to deactivate them first. And if you have your blog set up as www.yourblog.com, WordPress will ask you to change it to the non www. version, as it did me below. You will have to do this in Settings->General and WordPress will have you log in again because your cookie changed:

Wordpress 3 Multisite - Creating a Network

And if you want subdomains, WordPress will generate code for you to paste in your .htaccess file and wp-config.php file in the main folder of your WordPress 3 installation.

4. Final Steps For Your WordPress Subdomains

Every WordPress blog your create will need a place to upload files such as images, video and media. For this you will need to create a blogs.dir directory in your wp-content folder. and this folder must be writeable by your webserver. This is where WordPress will create the upload folders for each one of the blogs you create on the network.

Adding a blogs.dir directory for WordPress 3 Multisite

Now it is time to take that code that activating your network generated for you and pasting it where it belongs. But first remove the:

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

that I had you add earlier to the wp-confg.php file , because it’s in the generated code.

Once you make the .htaccess and wp-config.php changes and save the files, you will have to login once again.

How To Create New SubDomain Blogs in WordPress 3 in Super Admin

Once all of this is done, a new set of menus will appear above the Dashboard Menu called SuperAdmin. It is here you can add users and sites. You must also activate themes for network use here after you install them if you want to share new themes with the new blogs you create. You can also set network options here also.

But these are all the topics of other posts.

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