Jeremy

Thanks Marcus! I’ve just added those lines to my .htaccess and they work for redirecting https://mydomain.com into https://www.mydomain.com.

However, it doesn’t work for redirecting anything beneath that. Eg. if I enter https://mydomain.com/contact it won’t change that to https://www.mydomain.com/contact, although I need it to (also for SEO purposes).

Do you know the correct entry to use in .htaccess to achieve that?

I would still love to see this functionality built into your plugin directly – as an admin feature like you mentioned – so I don’t have to mess around with .htaccess, or remember to add it to .htaccess if I ever moved to a new host or something. That would be awesome, so I hope you will find the time to implement it at some stage in the future! ??

Thanks again!

Thanks Marcus, I appreciate you looking into this! I hope you’re able to figure out what’s going on.

Okay, thanks for the advice, it’s helpful! I’m starting to think that it will be easier to just drop the www, even though the perfectionist in me would prefer not to. Your points about nobody (else) caring are valid. ??

One thing I do find annoying is how you can type “www.example.com” (without http at the start) into most email clients or Office apps or other programs, and it will automatically be converted into a hyperlink, but that doesn’t work when you just type example.com by itself – with the latter, you have to first type https:// in order for the app to automatically convert it into a hyperlink, and that is a pain to do. But that’s nothing to do with WP of course.

BTW, I’m racking my brains to figure out what ETA stands for! I haven’t seen that abbreviation before, and I’m stumped! ??

Hi Mika, good to hear directly from you! ??

I’m pretty sure my server (ie. my web host) treats www as a true alias rather than as a subdomain. There’s a place in my web host’s configuration pages where I can specify the target folder on the server for ‘example.com’ (eg. the target folder being public_html), but I don’t need to also specify the target folder for https://www.example.com – it automatically goes to the same target folder as example.com.

My main reason for wanting to keep www in the URL is because that’s how it’s referenced everywhere else that we refer to it (eg. in print, in emails, etc etc) – the URL, and the current non-WP website, has existed for quite some time, and has always been with www. So for continuity I wanted to leave it like that.

I know it’s possible and easy to do a redirect from www to example.com. But – correct me if I’m wrong here – isn’t it true that with such a redirection, if I type https://www.example.com into my browser’s Address Bar, the URL will automagically change to https://example.com in the Address Bar after it’s been redirected? So the resulting URL which the end user sees does not have www in it? That’s really my main reason for not wanting to do a redirection – so that the URL which the users see will always have www in it, even in their Address Bar.

Maybe I need to rethink this and just make the change to removing the www. Or maybe I’ll take a risk and try it with www and see what happens. The jury’s still out for me! ??

I’m afraid I don’t quite follow that. What’s wrong with www being part of the rewrite rules? The main site will never use www2 – it will only use www.

There definitely would be subsites using subdomains, as this will be a subdomain install of Multisite, rather than a subfolder install. But as I’m the super admin, and I will be the sole person creating subsites, I don’t see why that could be a problem. I would set the main site as https://www.example.com and then create my subsites as site1.example.com, site2.example.com, etc (with whatever subdomain I want to use).

How exactly would subdomain conflicts break my site, as you wrote? If all of the subdomains have unique URLs, which are also different to the main site (www.exacmple.com), then where is the conflict? When a user enters https://www.example.com into his browser, he should get the main site, and when he enters site1.example.com into his browser, he should get the content from that site. Right?

Okay, I still don’t really get this, and I’m wondering if perhaps we’re not on the same page as each other. ??

First of all, with your quote above about subdomain multisite installs not working when the URL contains a path: I do understand that, but it doesn’t apply to me, as I’ll install WP into the document root, not into any subfolder or path. So no problems there.

I still don’t see why I can’t first install WP with a test subdomain (test.example.com) *without* enabling multisite – so WP is just an old fashioned, regular, non-network installation – then build the site how want it, then change the URL to https://www.example.com (using those plugins I mentioned previously for helping to change the URL) – and THEN, finally, turn on multisite by editing the wp-config.php file. Why wouldn’t that work? Because in this scenario, I’m taking an installation that uses https://www.example.com and turning *that* into a multisite setup, with https://www.example.com being the primary domain there. WordPress, at that stage, has no knowledge anymore of the old test.example.com domain – right?

Everything I’ve read at https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Before_You_Create_A_Network and https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Create_A_Network suggests that this should work fine. :S

Awesome, glad I’ve gotten my head around that! Next step is to try it out for real. Thanks for the help!

Ah, okay. So network activation basically forces the plugin onto all of the sites, whether they like it or not. Whereas with site activation, that would mean I (as super admin) simply install the plugin onto the server, but leave it up to each individual site admin to decide whether he wants that plugin on his site or not, and it’s up to him to turn it on. Is that right?

If so, that sounds pretty good to me, as in my case I’m only looking to create 3-4 different sites, and I’ll be the admin of most of them anyway (it’s for a small organisation where we want to have a few different team sites with their own unique themes and pages etc – but not a blog, with lots of users – just the admin and maybe 1-2 editors only).

I’m a bit confused as to why using a subdomain for my test site is more problematic than using a separate domain. Surely a domain is a domain, whether it’s test.example.com or exampletest.com? Either way, it needs to be changed from what it currently is, into https://www.example.com when I’m ready to go live, right? So surely the steps for changing it would be the same?

Please note that I would not need to move the actual WP files or change the database name at all. So the steps at https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Moving_WordPress mostly would not apply, as they are talking about moving the WP files from one location/folder on the server to another, or from one server to another server, which I would not be doing. I’d keep the files in the same folder on the same server, but simply change the URL (which will also require me to make some modifications to my domain settings with my web provider, which I can easily do).

I found a couple of plugins that seem to be designed to help change the URL when moving WP:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-move/
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/
I think I could use one of those to take care of the URL change for me.

In my original post above, I asked whether I could safely activate the multisite functionality (via that line in wp-config.php) after I’d built the site and changed the URL to make it live. I think the answer to that question is yes, right? In other words, it’s not necessary for me to activate multisite straight away after installing WP – I can first build my site with a non-network installation, creating all my pages and content and everything, and once it’s all done and I make the site live, I can afterwards (at any time) add that line to wp-config.php to enable the network functionality???? And then start creating the additional websites to the network that I want?

That way, I’d avoid some of the complications of changing the URL of a multisite WP, which, from what I can gather, is much more complicated to do than changing the URL of a non-multisite WP – right?

(Hope that makes sense!)

Hi Ipstenu,
Can you explain what is the difference between activating a plugin per site vs. network activated?

I have no clue what the difference is, as I haven’t yet actually worked with a multisite WP installation. ??

Okay, good to know. I had been particularly concerned by what I read at https://premium.wpmudev.org/wpmu-manual/installing-regular-plugins-on-wpmu/ where it says, in reference to installing a plugin:

“If installing on WordPress Multisite remember that many of the regular plugins you obtain from sources other than WPMU DEV don’t work on WordPress Multisite installs and may have compatibility issues.”

And in the comment section at the bottom of the page at https://www.onextrapixel.com/2011/07/07/the-ultimate-wordpress-multi-site-network-management-guide/ there are some references to certain backup plugins not working with multisite, which also let me to wonder if it was necessary for a plugin to have explicit support for multisite.

However you’re telling me that in general most plugins should work fine with multisite, even if they don’t claim explicit support for it. If so, that’s encouraging to know! ??