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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.