Versatility using symbolic links
I noticed over the weekend that my domain dcdo isn’t working. The tip off was that I wasn’t getting any spam in my inbox. How likely is that not to happen, really? Ping returns the new IP address but doesn’t reply. Probably some further adjustment to the DNS records needs to be made.
I haven’t taken the time to mess with the DNS issues because I haven’t been here much except for on weekends and this past weekend I was busy trying to figure out how to run WordpressMU; the multi-blog, mult-user version of the software I am running now. This is a key step in the process of changing my infrastructure from Domino to hosted WordPress. It wont be any fun maintaining and posting to a half-dozen or so blogs that each have a seperate installation.
Like on the other thing I got it working half-assed but then I had to keep tinkering with it to make it work how I want it too. The closest configuration I found as a model was from Dan Frey at the Office of the Provost Web Team blog at the University at Buffalo:
“Our situation is interesting, but I would not call it unique. We have a server that has multiple domains pointed at it. We installed MU in a directory off of the root of our server, /wordpressmu. Our default domain name is ugly - the idea was that we wanted folks to be able to go to nicedomain.buffalo.edu/myblog and get to their blog on our server.
Easier said than done…
Yep pretty much what I’ve found out. My situation is the same except I want to point any domain to any blog regardless of where the blog is and regardless of where the domain is. This is what I have so far:
I know the symlinks are the way to go and that’s how I found Dan Frey’s article–by Googling wordpress mu symbolic link. I’m pretty sure Dan has it figured out I just have to tinker with it some more.
But dang I can’t mess around with it forever. It’s one of those deals that I’ll have to revisit after I get a few other things worked out, like my damn mailserver at dcdo.
If you need a hand, drop me an e-mail - there’s quite a few little gotchas you need to watch out for. I have a SQL script that needs to be run each time you add a new MU blog that sets up some stuff in the MU tables and modifies the mod-rewrite rules. Once you get it working it’s great, it’s the figuring it out that’s the problem.
Comment by Dan — September 7, 2007 @ 8:59 am
I’ll probably take you up on that. I had to put the project aside for a couple of weeks with the holidays and school starting and all that but I am going to get back on it this weekend.
Thanks for stopping by and I appreciate the offer of assistance.
Comment by DC — September 8, 2007 @ 6:39 am