John

Ok, can you go to Network Admin->Sites, locate one of the blogs where things aren’t working and hover over it, selecting Edit. Can you paste what the URL is and what the Upload Path URL is?

As usual, it is best to disable all plugins and revert to the stock twentyten or twentyeleven theme if you are troubleshooting. If you want to go that route, there is a build-in shortcode you can use to test:

[gallery]

I’ve had this happen a few times. When shortcodes fail, it is either because the plugin that drives them has become deactivated/failed or because the text representing the shortcode was turned into HTML.

Go to the Post/Page editor and look at the Kontakt page, click on the HTML tab to edit in HTML view and look at the page content. Do you see it marked up with HTML tags around it? Or is it put in a line with other text?

You say it was working until recently, has anything been introduced in that time? A plugin that does code validation for example?

It’s possible that this will fit your needs. It is a plugin which provides logical conditions to decide what widgets appear. In order to avoid creating custom category page templates, you are going to have to set logical conditions on which instance of several category archive widgets is going to display on each particular page.

Actually, the folder you found in FTP is a storage location, but your site is served out of _virtual_ folders. so the two paths are not in disagreement, just used differently.

When you say image upload is not working could you describe the behavior you are seeing? Is it failing to locate the file locally, do you get an error when it uploads, does it upload fine but not display in the media library, etc…

They’ll definitely be able to log in and comment as themselves on all of the sites in the multi-site. If you want them to have assigned roles on all of the sites within a multi-site, you could try something like this.

You can actually get pretty fancy and redirect individual posts from their old URL to the new one, you can do this in groups, etc… Look at the documentation for the plugin here. You _may_ need to brush up on regular expressions if you want to get fancy, or you can just wildcard everything and say “no matter what URL you WERE trying to get to, you are going to this one”.

If you have questions about how a plugin operates you’ll have better luck contacting the developer directly.

Take a look at this: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/redirection/

Take a peek at this, it still uses one database for your local install, but is geared toward your testing purpose.

There are actually quite a few staging solutions. If necessary we can keep looking.

Yes, multi-site is run from one server. That one server hosts all of your sites. I must not be understanding why you can’t use one server for both downloads and other functions. Controlling access to content via membership and even payment is not uncommon. That being said, I can’t help you with any e-commerce stuff since my experience is pretty limited there.

Can you help me visualize the purpose? Are you trying to set up a staging environment or play with a development copy of WP without harming the production site? Or are you trying to set up some sort of redundancy?

So just to clarify, please log into your blogs admin panel (www.blogname.com/wp-admin) and click on Links. You should see a list of the links that populate the blogroll widget. You can select and delete any of the links you want. You can even add new ones. They have categories, etc…

I apologize if you already know this and have been encountering errors, we just want to know what the errors are because deleting content from the database directly is just a horribly bad idea.

What Mika and I are saying is don’t delete any records from the database. Leave it alone. The task you are trying to accomplish is carried out through the regular user interface. We are just trying to figure out if you have actually tried it, did it work, if not, did you get an error, etc…

Do Not Modify The Database Directly (unless you are quite fluent in the table relationships and WP data structure)

You can convert your single-install to a multi-site install later. When you do that, you configure whether you will use subdomains or subfolders for the additional sites (it is either/or not both). You would have to export content from your main site to each subsite. And, if you want to keep membership and other options synchronized between sites, find plugins that allow you to fulfill those kinds of functions.

If you are experienced with single-site WP, multi-site is 95% the same (a totally made up number), you are still managing one install. You just have to remember that the blogs on that install are, by default, ignorant of each other, but on the backend they use the same database, core files, plugins code, themes code, although they can (and will) be configured separately.

Visualize that you have 28 blogs running one single plugin and one single theme. Now you find out there is a vulnerability in the theme or the plugin! Oh no, you have to update it asap! With multi-site you do it once. With separate installs, you do it 28 times.

Good luck!