Domain Registration
First of all you have to register the domains you want to have in your WordPress Multi-Site installation. Personally I use GoDaddybecause they have any easy interface for searching available domain names plus registering a .com address with protection for .net and .org is cheap. GoDaddy’s prices are very competitive, but the main reason I use GoDaddy
is because Danica Patrick is hot.
Web Hosting
There is a bunch of different options for web hosting and GoDaddy is a very good one. However, I use Media Temple and their grid service because I can host as many domains as I went for just a tiny bit more than just hosting one domain with other services. Plus they allow SSH access, which makes using WordPress Multi-Site a whole lot easier to use.
To Park or not to Park
That’s really not the question. After registering your domain and purchasing your hosting you can login to your hosting account and add your domains. Rinse and repeat until you have all of your registered domains added to your Media Temple account.
Adding domains to your gridservice account
Setting up a network
After you have got your domains, hosting, added your domains to your Media Temple account and pointed your domains to the correct name servers, it is time to get to work on the WordPress side of things.
First you will have to get a network set up, which means you will have to make a small change to your wp-config.php file. Add this piece of code to your config file:
define('MULTISITE', true);
Now log back into your site you should see that you have some new options under settings in the dashboard. This picture shows what the settings tab looks like after installing the Domain Mapping Plugin. Now you can download and install the Domain Mapping plugin and follow the instructions on setting it up. Now you will need to SSH into your Media Temple hosting account and create some symbolic links for your domains.
Back to Media Temple
So you will need to login via SSH to your Media Temple gridservice account. Instructions for doing this can be found on Media Temple. This is a little easier for Mac users because we have the Terminal application, but it can be done by Windows users as well. Just fire up whatever command line utility that you use and login.
Once logged in enter these commands:
cd domains
rm -rf newsite.com
where newsite.com is one of the new sites you added in your account center. This will delete the site files that were created when you added your new domain. Now you need to create a sym link to your main domain with this command.
ln -s originalsite.com newsite.com
Leave the path blank under the info tab
Where originalsite.com is the site you want your new domain to point to and newsite.com is the domain that your are pointing at it. Remember originalsite.com is the main site you set up when you set up your network in WordPress. All of the new sites you have in your WordPress Multi-Site should have your originalsite.com as the primary domain.
You will set the url for newsite.com in the new SiteUrl field under the Settings tab
This is where you set the url of your new site
Add some more sites
Now you can add more sites and administer them all through one interface. Each one of your sites can have different themes, content, and users.