Recently an Open Source Marketer member contacted us for help with their WordPress MU installation. They had everything installed on Hostgator, but for some reason they weren’t able to automatically create subdomains.
Since they had set up their MU installation to use subdomains instead of subdirectories, this was driving them crazy. Each time they would create a new blog, they would get a site not found message.
At first it didn’t make sense. We had set up a full WordPress MU environment complete with BuddyPress and a ton of plugins as part of EpicChange’s TweetsGiving project last year and everything had worked fine.
I eventually put them on speaker phone so that Toff could hear the issue and lend a hand. Since we virtual office via Skype he was able to follow along. So, I recapped the issue and he reminded me that before we put the TweetsGiving website on another host, we had set up a test environment on Hostgator and there had been some issues then as well.
It had taken me three hours to find the solution then and here it was again poking me in the eye. The issue is that in order for WordPress Mu to be able to use multiple subdomains you need to enable wildcard support so your WordPress MU install will work properly. In this case they had to create a wild card dns entry using the Hostgator CPanel. The MU settings were already in place, but the dns wild card had not been created on Hostgator. So, they could create a new blog all day long, they just couldn’t get to any of them.
The steps to enable support on your hosting may be different, so if you run into a similar problem, you may want to check with your hosting company to see what they recommend. And of course you can always Google “WordPress MU YOUR HOST COMPANY HERE wildcards” for support docs. Hopefully that will save you 3 hours and a lot of grief.
If you’re setting up a WordPress MU site, send us a link. We love to see what other people are up to and if you have a time saving WordPress MU tip or trick, be sure to post it in the comments below.
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
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