separate multisite installs, or network within a network?

  • Hello!

    I have a multisite install that currently only has 2 sites: example.com and example.com/fr/ (for the French-language version of the site). I would also like to create a network of related sites as such:

    example.com/network/site-1
    example.com/network/site-2
    example.com/network/site-3
    …

    The network sites would have a different theme than the 2 main sites;
    I would like the example.com/network page to be a page where I introduce the network and thus it would share the same theme as the sub-sites, and would have pages of it’s own as well (such as: example.com/network/about-us/). Therefore, I suppose that example.com/network/ would also have to be it’s own site, the “main” site of the “network”.

    So what’s the best way of going about this? Can I do this with the single multisite install that I have already, or do I have to use the Networks+ plugin (https://wpebooks.com/networks/) to do this properly? Or should I forget all of the above and have a sub-domain with a separate multisite install as so: network.domain.com/site-1/ ? Wouldn’t doing so make Apache go a little nuts in trying to figure out which WP install is the correct one to go to when someone visits the domain?

    Another wrinkle to add: I will also want to add a few other sites as mapped domains at a later date, as part of the main network.

    Thanks for your input!

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  • If you make a second network in an install, it has to be a subdomain or a full TLD. Not a folder.

    There is NO plugin to change this, it;s a limitation in multisite itself (no nested subfolder sites).

    Two multisite installs can go on the same server. Apache figures it out just fine.

    Thread Starter Richard Archambault

    (@richardmtl)

    And I just realized that I never closed this topic. Apologies!

    Thanks Andrea for your help!

    So thanks to a great suggestion from a friend who was thinking outside the box, here is what I ended up doing:

    • I stayed with 1 multisite install without a subnetwork
    • I created the example.com/network/ site as desired, which allowed me to use it as the “landing page” of the network (apart from my main site), and also which let me have pages attached to the landing page (ie. example.com/network/about-us)
    • for the subsites, rather than have example.com/network/site-1, example.com/network/site-2, example.com/network/site-3, I INSTEAD have example.com/network-site-1/, example.com/network-site-2/, example.com/network-site-3/

    See what I did there? My friend who suggested this was quite clever. So each subsite is clearly part of the network, with the network- in the site URL, but are simply additional subsites in my overall multisite. It didn’t really matter if they had a / or a – in the URL, in the end. I hope others who come across this same type of situation also get inspired by this idea.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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