Here’s how I got Multisite Domain Mapping to work…
3 days of experimenting, getting error messages, time lost and frustration…
Use the Trunk version available at
https://ottopress.com/2010/wordpress-3-0-multisite-domain-mapping-tutorial/
and pay attention to the guidelines on that page.
If your multisite wordpress installation is set up on an add-on domain on your host (I use hostgator), then I couldn’t get it to work by using parked domains, so I re-installed everything, new database, new wordpress, and then I added the network to use directories (instead of the freakish nightmare of subdomain wildcards).
To set up the htaccess file, I used FileZilla ftp but it added dodgy code in the file which I could not see. On going into File Manager via my cpanel I could see the dodgy code and could then paste in the required network rewrites.
The directory called blog.dir really is a directory called blog.dir and not just blog.
Once it’s all set up, go into each site you create into the backend and from there add the domain you want to map to.
Forget all the a record dns settings mumbo jumbo, and just do what any normal person would do to set up a domain to work on their site. Add the nameservers that your host gives you.
Then, add your desired domain as an add-on domain (not parked domain – providing you are using the directory set up rather than the subdomain setup) and whilst adding the add-on domain, set the root directory to the root directory of your wordpress multisite installation (and not the new site directory that are createing).
I really hope these notes helps save some people hours of lost time and frustration.
And please bare in mind today’s date of August 22 and be wary of amends to the plugin and what not.
This thread had some noteworthy points:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/30-multisite-domain-headaches-mapping-dns-to-subdomain
You can do it!
Peace
Gavriel Shaw
