We’re making some business changes to The Bloomery, and combining two different sites into a single WordPress blog. The outcome we want is multiple domains all pointing to the main blog. And we want to run it on Windows/IIS. Out of the box, WordPress is designed for a single blog with a single domain, but there are a number of settings and plugins that we used to end up with what we wanted.
With WordPress 3.0, there is a new Multisite Network option, where multiple blogs can be created in the context of a single installation, and different domains can map to each of the child blogs. There is the option of using subdomains (blog1.mysite.com, blog2.mysite.com) or subdirectories (mysite.com/blog1/, mysite.com/blog2/). When you set up Multisite, you have to choose one or the other, and you can’t change once you’ve made your choice. In either case, you have to make some edits to the .htaccess file for URL redirects/rewrites. On IIS 7, there is no .htaccess file, but we can accomplish the same thing with the web.config and the URL Rewrite Module.
Make sure all your domains point to the correct hosting account, and install WordPress. After installing WordPress, here’s what needs to be done:
1. Set up a Multisite Network using subdirectories; follow the steps at http://www.lauragentry.com/wordpress/?p=517.
2. Install the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin, from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/. You need to do a manual installation, but it’s easy. For some additional information on this plugin, see http://ottopress.com/2010/wordpress-3-0-multisite-domain-mapping-tutorial/.
3. The main site is assigned a site ID of 1. From the main site’s control panel, under the Super Admin, you want to add all your domains with a site ID of 1. They won’t show up in the mapping, so just try and visit each of your domains to see if they all point to the main site.
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