Migration to WordPress Network Part 3
I haven't talked about this in awhile, but everything has been running smoothly. Having only two instances I need to worry about is definitely better than the 5+.
However, today, I wanted to add a subdomain to a domain that is hosted in the WordPress Network. It took a few minutes to remember what I had done (thankfully all the articles I already read helped), but a few minutes later I had a subdomain running.
Essentially it is the same setup as before:
- Create the website in the WordPress Network Admin site (i.e. subdomainA.rebelpeon.com)
- Create the subdomain mirror entry in the Dreamhost panel under your main WordPress Network domain (i.e. subdomainA.rebelpeon.com)
- Create the subdomain mirror entry in the Dreamhost panel for the site you want (i.e. subdomainA.displaydomain.com)
- Add in the domain mapping
- Celebrate!
CloudFlare
I was using CloudFlare for awhile, but realized it was causing a few issues. In practice it sounds like a great idea, essentially the same as any CDN, but free. However, when editing posts on other websites, WordPress was never able to just the ajax to format the text in the visual viewer. It wasn't really that it didn't render it, it was more that it would take until a timeout is hit to render anything in the body field.
Simply not acceptable. As soon as I deactivated CloudFlare, it worked great. Needless to say, it's not something I really need, so I just removed it.
Currently reading: 
Finished reading between posts: 
Migration to WordPress Network Part 2
I had two outstanding items to figure out before migrating my last site. Today I was able to knock off one.
My Director installation used to be a directory under my website. Unfortunately, with migrating to a wordpress network, that wouldn't work. This is because everything is done via DNS redirection and so a directory doesn't physically sit where you think it does. I can only think of the nightmares it could cause.
Instead, I moved it to a sub domain. This seemed to fix all the issues, and it is actually pretty nice there. I just had to update a few links on various pages, make a few php.ini updates, and all was well.
Now it's on to the massive site. I think I have to import only a few records at a time. Turns out, with all the media attached to each post, it kept timing out.
Update: Well, that was a fun experiment. Since I can't seem to upload any of my previous entries (Dreamhost kills the script), I've decided things are working ok with two WordPress installs, and that's how it will stay. The other site is huge anyways, so it makes sense...
Migration to WordPress Network
Well, the migration to a WordPress Network is nearing completion. All sites, except for my largest (in terms of uploaded content) have been migrated, and figuring out what I'm going to do with my Director install. This will save me so much time with upgrades and various other maintenance from now on.
I know that I had a post about this earlier, specifically how to do this on Dreamhost, but I thought I'd provide a few additional insights.
- If you are using subdomains instead of folders, do not have Dreamhost tack on www to the root Network domain until after you've migrated all sites over. If you aren't migrating, but simply setting up all new sites, then you don't have to worry about it. This causes issues because it tries to resolve subdomain.domain.com to www.subdomain.domain.com, which doesn't exist.
- I am using full domains to map to the subdomains via the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin. If you want to have non-www resolve to www, make sure www.notnetworkdomain.com is your primary and notnetworkdomain.com is also listed.
- If you have the Domain Mapping already setup to point to your www.notnetworkdomain.com during the migration, when you try to hit subdomain.networkdomain.com, it will redirect you to www.notnetworkdomain.com. That is, reverse mappings happen also, which is cool.
- Depending on when you setup your domains at Dreamhost, it is possible their A records point to different IP addresses. Mirroring only works when they have the same A record IP. This happened to me on quite a few domains. To fix, simply delete the domain from Dreamhost, then recreate it as a mirror. Once the mirror is created, re-setup your custom MX records or any other DNS records you originally had.
- Don't import entries on a crappy network connection. It doesn't work and continuously times out.
Outside of those issues, it went fairly painlessly. It also helps if you have someplace that has quickly updating DNS. I can't tell you how many times I saw the "bad_http_conf" error, while I was waiting for DNS to propagate.
I'm also amazed at how easily most of the plugins have worked with the network config. I was really expecting more pains in that area.
WordPress Network on Dreamhost
I'm just copying these instructions here, since I can't seem to reliably access the website they are currently hosted on.
I think I'm going to change a few ways things are hosted here on my collection of sites. It is a pain to keep them all updated and managed. Therefore, I am looking into migrating to a WordPress Network (Multi-Site) setup. However, using subdomains doesn't work with Dreamhost because of Dreamhost not allowing wildcards.
Here is the work-around (verbatim) from a fellow Dreamhost user.
- Follow the directions for setting up your WordPress multisite (I will assume that you already know or have found the directions to do so).
- Pick the subdomain feature while in setup.
- Ignore the message you get saying that things may not work properly because of the Wildcard missing.
- When you’ve followed all those wonderful instructions, create a test blog. You may end up with a URL like domain.comdatabase_name. I did, and continue to do so. Just edit that blog’s settings (Super Admin -> Sites -> Edit) so that the Path field only has a / in it. I’m unsure if this is a problem that user’s at other hosts have, or if it is exclusive and will soon be fixed, but once it is changed all is well.
- Go to your Dreamhost Web Panel and mirror a subdomain for the blog you just added to the domain you set the multisite up on. NOTE: If you create blog.domain.comin WordPress multisite, you must create the same subdomain in your Web Panel — blog.domain.com. Visit blog.domain.com and verify that it leads you to the new blog you created.
- If that works, then you need to install the Domain Mapping plugin for multisite.
- This gives you a new menu to add a domain to your network and “park” it over a subdomain.
- All you have to do is follow the directions there to add the domain, and you are set.
- Just mirror that same domain to the multisite domain in your Dreamhost Web Panel, and everything should be in working order.
Now on to testing!
Currently Reading: 
Dreamhost Increase PHP Upload Size
Needed to upload some videos into my SlideShow Pro Director install. However, my PHP upload size was set to 20MB and the videos were both 23MB. After some Googling, I found a painless way to fix it.
- Ensure your domain is running FastCGI for PHP5
- Download DreamHost Custom PHP.ini from DeamHost Scripts and Tips
- Put the dh-phpini.php file at the root of your website
- Access http://<website>/dh-phpini.php
- Click to install and it will create the necessary files and folder
- Edit the php.ini in the newly created /cgi-bin/ folder in the following two places: post_max_size, and upload_max_filesize
- SSH into your website and run the following command for it to take affect (kills FastCGI): killall -9 php5.cgi
All this good info was found at BlueSunray, so thanks for that!
Moved from EE
My Dreamhost server was upgraded awhile ago, and ever since then I have had nothing but issues with my installation of EE. A lot of other things had issues too, but I was easily able to reinstall and everything worked. Sadly, that was not an option for EE as my yearly download had expired. No way was I going to pay just to get things back to where they were.
Needless to say I have been wanting to migrate over, and just never really had the time to do it.
Well, I did it today because I've been wanting to post a few things. I think everything migrated over fairly well, but there are definitely a few issues. I really wanted to use some rewrite logic to keep all the inbound links working, but I'm afraid that just isn't going to happen.
Without further ado, hopefully there were be some fun tech updates soon!