Deome

Thank you, Ipstenu–I’ve been trying to solve the same problem for four days now, and I didn’t realize that my host was pointing each subdomain at its own directory. Changing my subdomains to point to the root solved the problem!

I only wish this was made clearer in the Create A Network installation guide.

I just solved a similar problem of installing multisite capabilities this morning, and I agree that information is hard to find sometimes.

Ive read that when setting up multisite, it must be installed at the root of the domain, Im not sure if this means whether or not it can be installed in the root of a subdomain?

What I would like to achieve is this:

Ok, I have my primary domain, but owuld like to run WordPress multisite from a subdomain blogs.mydomain.com and my additional blogs from subfolders;

blogs.mydomain.com/blog1
blogs.mydomain.com/blog2

From what I understand, you cannot run multisite from a subdomain IF you wish to use subdomains for new sites. However, since you are planning to use subdirectories, I believe that will work fine. This distinction is made pretty clear here: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Create_A_Network#Server_Requirements.

I then want to use domain mapping to point other domains to these blogs, such as

https://www.mysite1.com > blogs.mydomain.com/blog1
https://www.mysite2.com > blogs.mydomain.com/blog2

As for your second problem, I think you’re going about it the wrong way by using domain mapping to redirect traffic. If you’re using permalinks, which I think are required for multisite capabilities anyway, then you’d have a much easier time of it just using domain redirects (set these up through your webhost; if you’re running your own server, then you should probably already know how to do this) to link to the permalink for each blog’s home page.

So, outside of WordPress entirely, you’d just set up a permanent redirect on each domain:

https://www.mysite1.com > Permanent Redirect > blogs.mydomain.com/blog1
https://www.mysite2.com > Permanent Redirect > blogs.mydomain.com/blog2

Just make sure you’re using permalinks to blogs.mydomain.com/blog1, /blog2, etc.–they might be different than the obvious https://blogs.mydomain.com/blog1. I would set those blogs up first and find the permalink to each one, and (using a different web browser, like Firefox if you normally use IE; this prevents the site from recognizing you as still logged in as the super-admin) punch that permalink in to the browser to see if it takes you straight to the blog you want to link to. Make sense?