Pointing multiple domains at a single blog

Thats because it is likely not a WP issue. To point many domains at a single page is no great feat, if you have access to both the DNS provider of the domains, and of the web server. You can simply ask your DNS provider to alias as many domains to a single IP address ) as you want. They simply place an entry for the https://www.domainname.com which gives the IP address of the main webserver.

Then you have the serer provider add an entry in the config file for the web server to set an alias the main servers address (i.e. https://www.mainserver.com) for each added domain.

The process then becomes that the request for https://www.seconddomain.com goes to its ICAN provider, who then sends it to the IP address of https://www.mainserver.com, whose web server software then sees https://www.seconddomain.com is an alias for https://www.mainserver.com, who then feeds out the pages for https://www.mainserver.com as if they were those of https://www.seconddomain.com.

Most dns and webserver providers even have an interface as part of the account that allow you to do this any time you want…

While that’s a nice tutorial on DNS 101, it’s largely irrelevant to the question. The domains are already pointing to the correct place. What I’m trying to do is have wordpress handle the aliasing – This is not especially difficult with .htaccess rewrites, but since WP is heavily invested in rewrites, it seems silly that it can’t add the requisite redirects internally when creating a network. This should be as simple as adding one or more alias fields in the network setup.

As of now, I can do a redirect manually by pointing those domains to their own hosting directory and putting a 301 redirect in that directory’s .htaccess, but it’s an ugly hack and a pain to manage effectively.

Well, if the domains are all pointing at the correct recipient domain, why would you use wordpress to do it when a simple http-conf alias entry would do the rest? You can edit it quickly manually, or create a script or webpage interface to add them from. Or did your desription fai to mention the part that you might want something to be dynamically changed depending on which souorce domain name the request comes from?

If all you want is to have every domain pointing to the “right place” reach the page that the “right place” puts out natively, then it doesnt matter what what the domain name of the referring site is.

If you have https://www.site1.com refered to https://www.sitemain.com and in the http-conf, once it gets their it “sees” it as if you had logged on to https://www.mainsite.com directly, sharing the html directory and paths as if you had logged on directly.

Which is what you described you wanted…

I have 8 different domains (and several subdomains of those) pointed at this particular wordpress instance, all of them get different sites. Where WP falls short with networks is the 1:1 ratio between domain names and blogs. I want a many:1 ratio on SOME of the blogs, not all. This is not a case of having multiple domain names funneling into a single blog. Some blogs have a single domain name associated with them, others have more than one.

This used to be solved by using a domain mapping plugin with wordpress MU. As of V3, most of those domain mapping plugins became obsolete due to the merge of MU into the core code. The few that remained going concerns pretty much stopped working after the subsequent point releases.

As of V3, most of those domain mapping plugins became obsolete due to the merge of MU into the core code.

That is incorrect. Very incorrect.

Those domains mapping plugins not only *still* work they have been updated for multisite.

The plugin repo won’t also changes in the title.

I must not have been looking at the right ones – virtually all the ones I found said “compatible up to 2.something or 3.2.1” or returned “broken” when selecting 3.3 as a version.

The one in the repo works – you might have to check out the dev version.

There was a slight hitch with 3.3. ??

(also, anyone can mark a plugin as broken even if they haven;t used it. A bit of a flaw in the plugin rating system)