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I re-read the plugin info more recently also and what caught my eye this last time is:

If your user is mapping a hostname of a domain (sometimes called a “subdomain”) like https://www.example.com or blog.example.com it’s sufficient to create a CNAME record pointing at their blog url (NOT IP address).

Particularly after not being able to, at the Registrar’s DNS setting panel, change the domain to point to my supersite-wp-network domain.

It may be that you can use CNAME *only* for third level domains, such as https://www.subsite.com or blog.subsite.com and you CANNOT DO CNAMES for second-level like pointing subsite.com to the main supersite.

I guess I’ll stick to using the IP….

Thanks for the clarification; much appreciated.

@ron – thanks for the clarification… I think I got it, or at least part of it.

The following setup seems to be working. Does it look good to you? I guess this is too important to not be done right….

1. At domain registrar: I set up the domain (DNS) for the subsite owner to point to the right IP address of my multisite install

*.client7.com --> xx.xx.xx.xx (ip address of my multisite)
@.client7.com --> xx.xx.xx.xx
www.client7.com --> xx.xx.xx.xx

[ignore “https://” whihc is added automatically by this forum engine]

2. On server using cPanel: Parked user’s domain (client7.com) on the server

3. In WordPress Domain Mapping: Set up domain mapping for that subsite to add “client.com” as a domain and made it primary.

This seems to be working fine and looks right. The site will be shown when a visitor goes to either:
https://client7.com
https://www.client7.com
https://random-string.client7.com

All versions will actually go to https://client7.com (without www)

Now, if the user wants their primary web address to have the www… so all of the go to https://www.client7.com

I simply add https://www.client7.com in WordPress Domain Mapping and just set it to be the primary ; that seems to be working (all traffic resolves to https://www.client7.com) Do I need to do anything else? (e.g. Park https://www.client7.com on the server too? Do anything else on the DNS side?)

Additionally I am thinking about removing the hard-wired dependency on the IP address and use the CNAME option instead but that is also somewhat unclear. If you have any insight on that, would be great!

In the DNS settings for client7.com will I need to simply point to supersite.com, like so below?

*.client7.com --> supersite.com
@.client7.com --> supersite.com
www.client7.com --> supersite.com

[ignore “https://” whihc is added automatically by this forum engine]

(or to some subdomain like redirect.supersite.com which in turn points to the xx.xx.xx.xx ip address of the supersite?)

At least on Network Solutions DNS panel it looks like I cannot set the above; it is giving me an error that A records already exist. But if I have to delete the A record in order to create the CNAME, the site will break after I delete the A and before the CNAME is propagated…

Thoughts?

@ron, I am not sure I understand your second answer. I think what you are saying is to have only one mapping set up in WP, right?

Using the names in my example I would have mapping set for https://client7.com and that’s it.

Ans if I want the www. version to be the main website (https://www.client7.com) I would need to edit the .htaccess for that subsite??

I wouldn’t be able to just map to https://www.client7.com directly??

Thanks.

That makes sense; thanks.

Thanks for the input, it is starting to make more sense.

Looks like NGG is multisite aware as I see the NGG related tables when I inspect the WP database from the WP-DBmanager plugin. For example, I see:

400 razv_52_ngg_album 1 124 bytes 2.0 KiB 0 bytes
401 razv_52_ngg_gallery 3 516 bytes 2.0 KiB 0 bytes
402 razv_52_ngg_pictures 23 11.6 KiB 3.0 KiB 0 bytes

Note my WP database prefix is “razv”. So my understanding now is those three tables are multisite aware and are NGG tables specific for subsite id# 52 and residing in the WP database. However, a typical WP database backup would ignore these tables, right? I guess I would have expected all backups to provide an option for backing up the whole database, not just some known specific sub-set… am I missing something here?

Luckily the BackupBuddy has an option to:

Backup all database tables: Enable backing up all tables in your database (not just WordPress tables). Use this if your plugins create their own custom tables. [disabled by default]

When I enabled it, bam; it did backup the NGG data and then when I restored the backup in a new subsite, the NGG data was there too. That part seemed to work swiftly. The one it got stuck was that NGG hard-codes somehow the path to the subsite id# so restoring int the new subsite still has the gallery path hard-wired and pointing to the initial site. A plugin reset takes care of hat. I loose my custom settings but I guess I can’t have everything. Still sounds like a heck of a lot easier than the alternative of doing all the steps manually… (at least given my unfamiliarity with PHPadmin)

Makes sense?

Andrea, can you clarify a couple of points for me? I am light on PHP/database experience but still trying to piece together the bigger picture and best workflow…

The NextGen Gallery data is inside the WordPress database, right? I see 3 table “rows” related to “ngg”. So how does a duplicator/replicator ignore some of the tables in the database; are some *more* WP than others, in that database?

The other thing I have noticed is that the duplicator from BackupBuddy actually does create those three “wp_ngg” tables but they seem to be empty (when I compare with the size of the tables in the original site).

What I have been able to muster as a workaround is to export the subsite using BackupBuddy and then import it as a new subsite. This way I am getting the wp_ngg info and images display correctly. HOWEVER, remaining issue is that NextGen Galley is pointing as the default gallery path being the path related to the initial subsite id#. The single way I am able to change the path to the new subsite id# is to do an Options Reset for the NextGen Gallery plugin. Unfortunately, that reset all my custom options for the plugin so I then have to redo.

Based on your experience and the info above, do you have any better way of being able to duplicate a subsite and keep NGG info and plugin options intact?

Thank you.

You can take a look at BackupBuddy. It is in beta for multisite. Just got it and testing it out myself. Am trying to do subsite duplication and not working that well (fails to duplicate NextGen Gallery data) but for backups I think it’ll do just fine.

Andrew, thank you so much for your helpful and detailed input! This issue has been weighing on me for a while. Was happy to receive your response a while ago but only now was able to implement it and verify that it works as I need it to.

Much appreciated!

Also, did you find a similar plugin that works? I also tried WP Maintenace Mode and is not working either…

Same issue here. I am running WP in Network (multi-site) mode; you too?

I ended up using another plugin that has collapse/expand functionality on the subpage hierarchy. Unfortunately it does not have the shortcode to have children excerpt appear on parent page, which I really liked in your plugin.

Thanks for the follow-up.

More details about this feature request are in this other thread:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/custom-label-like-all-in-one-seo

Sarah, I use NiceNavigation plugin to provide a great expand/collapse “explorer” type navigation in the sidebar. I don’t think this is something that WP Custom Menus are able to do, right?

For SEO purposes page names should be long. But since the sidebar provides a tight space, I need to provide short custom labels.

Using your plugin I am able to provide a short custom page label whihc the NiceNavigation plugin picks up and uses for the sidebar widget. I am not sure how the two “talk” but I must assume you both use some sort of standard WP field like “PageMenuLabel” (or maybe you both use a non-standard name whihc coincidentally is the same).

Do you think I would be able to give a value to that field (“PageLabelMenu”?) using the WP custom menu functionality? How would I do that?

I remember trying that and had issues with it. But I just tried it now and see it working fine; can’t repro or even remember what the previous issue was…

Thanks!