Multi-site plugin and image uploads

[Andrea_R]

has anyone that uses this heavily noticed if there are any issues with the users uploading and posting images? Like them being in the wrong spot?

[Luke]

Sorry, wrote my own domain management solution. So I can't help.

As a note, though, it doesn't have any problems with uploads. Before or after the new domain.

[trent]

I haven't had any issues as that is only the "site" portion of the install while the same structure after the domain name is there for files and such regardless of the address in the blog backend.

Trent

[Andrea_R]

okay good. It was not reported to me, but was initially a problem for the client, who ... ah crap, basically I got a whole bunch of stuff to fix and the easiest way is to literally set them up on a new install. So trying to make sure I won;t come up against the same issue. (although given what they did to get it running...  )

And yeah, I gotta light a fire under someone's pants WRT to a multi-domain manager...

[Luke]

I think you just junked it up, and have come to ask the experts here.

he he he

[Andrea_R]

Oh please... 

even my level of expertise a year ago would not have it this jacked up. Stuff is hard-coded and hacked all over the place AND 80+ add-on domains are each added to the httpd.conf file via script. Even with a wildcard named host. and no, there's no wildcard subdomains either, so each sub-blog is also added to the hosts file.

(can you say loading as slow as molasses in January?)

Yeah, I already told them whoever installed it didn't know jack about MU. Or even WP.

[Luke]

Then why you gotta go and screw it all up like that?

[ron_r]

And yeah, I gotta light a fire under someone's pants WRT to a multi-domain manager...

Wish it were January

[Andrea_R]

Getting a little hot in here, honey? 

[ZappoMan]

Ok, stupid question...

What's the multi-site plugin do, and why would I want it?

I assume from the name (and the description over on wpmudev.org) that it manages having multiple "sites"... but I guess I'm trying to figure out what a site really gives you.

I am assuming you don't automatically get different wp_users and wp_blogs with each site... right? Or do you?

Am I just lame because I don't realize how cool it is? Is it like twitter? And I'm just too old or dumb to "get it"?

[Andrea_R]

It's the plugin people use when they want the subdomain blogs to have their own domain. Then it's called a "site" instead of a sub-blog or blog.

And it is horrendously badly coded.

I was going to go through and maybe write up some bugs from it for the guy (since I keep complaining about it  ) but I honestly don't know where to start.

http://wpmudev.org/project/Multi-Site-Manager

(and I *love* twitter, but then again I am chatty as well as old...)

[Luke]

It's the plugin people use when they want the subdomain blogs to have their own domain.

"Most people"... he he he he he he

[ZappoMan]

So, here's what I don't get.

I am running a couple of blogs that are on their own domains, and all I did was change the domain and URLs in the edit-blog UI. Everything seems to work just fine. And I'm not using this plugin.

Of course my "site" is only the one main site... but blogs seem to have no problem running on their own domains.

example:

main site: foo.com
blog 1: blog1.foo.com
blog 2: blog2.foo.com
blog 3: spam.com
blog 4: community.bigcorp.com

What am I missing?

[Luke]

Interesting.

MU should be checking the http_host for the domain, stripping subs, then bouncing that off the site table.

If it doesn't find the domain in the site table, it throws up the "No WPMU site defined on this host" error, or whatever it says exactly.

[Andrea_R]

Whoa, yeah zappoman. Usually without the plguin I mentioned there's like 30 steps to go thru manually to change a bunch of db values.

If you've accidentally got it to work this simply, that'd be AMAZING.

What's in your httpd.conf?

[ZappoMan]

I'm using vhost (I've never tried this with the blog in a subdirectory, so maybe that's the reason this works for me).

My httpd.conf is pretty simple, it turns on read access to my directory that wpmu is in:

Code:

<Directory "/path/to/wordpressmu">
    Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride FileInfo Options
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

And then it uses apache virtual hosts:

Code:

NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/wordpressmu"
    ServerName foo.com
    ServerAlias *.foo.com
</VirtualHost>

Now that I look at that, it is interesting that apache is happily serving spam.com from the same virtual host area, but, heck, it seems to work.

Then as I said, I just set the domain in the edit blog screen. It's about 5 places I have to change.

@Luke, Can you explain your use case that causes the site not found error? I've only seen that in cases where either my db was down and wpmu wasn't able to get any site/blog info.

[Andrea_R]

Huh. Well, I can see why it's answering for those domains (which I already knew).

But I'd be interested in trying your method of only changing a few db values.

usually the manual process is like this:
http://bui4ever.com/web-itecture/wordpress_mu_with_domain_mapping

[Luke]

Pretty simple, really. MU looks for the domain and path being called in $wpdb->site. It tries several combination's, and if doesn't find that domain it throws out the "No WPMU site defined on this host" error.

[ZappoMan]

@Andrea - I just do everything down to step 16 on that list... I don't mess around with the site at all... So these other domains are technically still part of "site 1"...

I guess that's the point of my question, why do I want to make a different "site"?

In reading the bui4ever post I see that this would let you specify different site admins, but honestly, I don't want any of my users messing around with that stuff...

@Luke - Maybe the fact that everything is still pointing to site 1 for me explains why it still works.

[Luke]

Looking through that file, if you only have 1 site in the site table, it never runs the check function.

Seems to be how it's getting around it, since there is only 1 site, it uses that and never runs the check.

Helps to see the function being called, and not just the function.

[ZappoMan]

@Luke - yeah, that's what I thought.

So, I guess the question remains, why would you want multiple sites? If you can get most of the functionality from just using 1 site?

What does multi-site give me... other than (apparently) headaches?

[Luke]

Honestly, not a thing.

Multi-site would only really apply when you want to run say, 4 domains and allow registrations on each one. That would be the only need, really, so that you can have separate settings for each site. (like upload, etc.)

Honestly, you could probably hack the config file and run subdirectories and subdomians off the same file set.

[Andrea_R]

Yep, the plugin (and the method I linked to) also allows each site or fully-domained sub-blog to also be an MU site. and funnily enough, most people using the plugin don't use that feature.

Edit to add: Oh yeah, the plugin also adds an admin menu to keep track of the blogs with their own domain. In mu, following those steps, it gets knocked off the blogs list.

one question: on spam.com can you login as site admin? I'm thinking your method may solve a huge headache for me.




I need to bake so many people brownies. this is like a best-kept secret. (okay maybe not secret but the light bulb is coming on)

[ZappoMan]

Multi-site would only really apply when you want to run say, 4 domains and allow registrations on each one.

@Luke - the thing is, I get that that's how it should work in theory... but when I glanced at the code (I didn't dig really deep, I admit)... I didn't see the site stuff creating different wp_blogs or wp_user tables... so pretty much any registration happens for all sites, as far as I can tell... Did I miss something? Also any plugin that acts on "all the blogs" will pretty much still show all the blogs... unless that plugin checks the site_id... which in all the plugins I've seen (and written) they don't.

This feels a little bit like a little toe or an appendix... you know, like something that evolution just hasn't gotten rid of yet, but it doesn't really do much for us...

@Andrea - my login process is a little bit custom... I wrote a custom login plugin that gives me a sidebar widget for loggin in, as well as it replaces the login UI on my master domain (foo.com) or if I specify on the subdomains... I just did this so that I would get cookies set in both places, I wanted it to behave where if you logged in to spam.com, you also got logged in to foo.com.

BUT.... let's assume you're logged in using the standard wp-login.php... then as far as I can tell, site_admin just works normally... which is to say, if I specify a user as a site_admin, then they are an admin on both foo.com and spam.com.... since, to Luke's point, they are both "the same site".

I am ok with this behavior... because honestly, none of my users should ever be site admins... and I don't expect to have site admins that would only be admins to one site or the other...

In some sense I wanted this to behave like wp.com's custom blog domain behavior... and it seems to work exactly like that. (Module the whole DNS issue, which I am ignoring in this thread.)

Anyway, thanks for clarifying all this... I think I'm happy with the behavior I have and don't yet see the need to run multiple sites.

[Andrea_R]

Oh thanks for clarifying things on your end.  I'm not a fan of the plugin myself, but I have a clients using it and things are so bad I'm setting them up on a new install. The step you go thru to set up a new site are actually *less* than what she does now - WITH the plugin.

And she has uploading issues, and slow page loads, and can't log in as site admin, and and.....

Hmm. So all I *really* need is a little wee site admin plugin to show what blogs have their own domain. should be easy enough.

And BOY do I feel like writing a big ol' tutorial post on this to blow some stuff right outta the water.

[Luke]

That's where MU makes it nice, though.

You don't need separate user, blog, etc tables. Everything is in one, and based on a site id to define which site it's a member of.

So, registering on d1.tld, or d2.tld makes no difference in terms of wp_blog, their blog id, etc. That blog id just ends up tied to a site id, and its settings applied.

Makes it nice, in some ways, but can also make for a pain in others.

One cool thing though, is that with individual site settings, you can have different things per site. Like admins, themes, etc.

[bui4ever]

Perhaps I can add my two cents?

Zappoman has been asking what is the point of having multiple sites on a single MU install. Simple, management. By having one MU install with me as the Site Admin, I can grant my friends and families their own site with their own domain name with Administrator only rights to their site. That way they can do whatever they want, change the theme, blog, etc. and when they run into a problem, I just login as myself and fix the issue as a Site Admin. Also the reason you want to duplicate the site_admins table to each of the new blogs is because, you, as Site Admin won't see the Site Admin menu thereby you can't easily do Site Admin stuff to that other domain. Cloning that site_admins table entry won't grant any users of any of the sites Site Admins unless you go into the Site Admins and add their username as a Site Admin. Also I don't have to keep going around installing single wordpress installs for every site I want and also upload all the same plugins AND backup all the databases. With WPMU, I can do everything in one shot, have a group of plugins, themes, etc. and UPGRADING is much easier. Instead of going to 10 WP installs, I just upgrade the MU site. Of course on the flipside, you mess 1 thing up, you take down 10...

And also as Andrea_R mentioned, the beauty of having the multi-site option is that each site can have it's own virtual subdomain for things such as this: andreaandrichard.com (my wife and I's site) and 1178.andreaandrichard.com (a subsite I created for her birthday).

I'm still using the Multi-Site Manager (don't know why really), and I still think it's a mess. It *works*...

[Andrea_R]

See, for me that doesn't work.

Sure, when you clone the first few it works, but the ones I do after that, choosing the exact same options every time, leave me unable to access the new blogs as site admin.

Being able to use the sub-blogs as another mu-install is a lesser issue for me. Being able to access them as site admin is kinda a given.

And I've tried this with different version of MU on 3 different servers.

Also, if you read thru the plugin itself, it does not actually follow any of the outlined steps that everyone manually goes through. ID's actually wind up slightly off too.

Another issue is when the bog is initially created, you get a "No WPMU site defined on this host" until you go edit any blog field. Doesn't matter, just edit something and save and somehow it sets itself to rights.

I'm not trying to harp on anything here, but I really hate seeing one bad option out there. When you get into more enterprisey type sites and business applications, and people have some serious money riding on this, it's a lame effort.

(why yes, we are trying to sit down and whip up something better. only 24 hours in a day tho)

[ZappoMan]

@bui4ever - Everything you described I can do with WPMU and a SINGLE SITE...

So let me be clear... OF COURSE, WPMU is totally the way to go.

And I set up domains all the time from alternate TLDs... my foo.com, spam.com example... and they all work FINE out of a single WPMU with the only using site 1.

When I log in to their dashboard, I have full Site Admin functionality...

The only thing I can see that is missing would be if I wanted to have different SITE wide settings for the few plugins that use site settings. I can think of a couple plugins that use sitemeta instead of blog options, but for the most part I probably want those settings for all the blogs even those on other TLDs.

Sorry if I'm being dense here... I'm not understanding the point of multiple sites.

I have a long track record of being proven to be dense... so it's no surprise I'm missing the nuance here. Feel free to keep beating it in to me... eventually I'll figure it out.

[ZappoMan]

Ok... I just thought of a couple things that are site specific... that you might want to change... between two sites on the same machine...

Things like the welcome blog post, and welcome message.

Duh... Ok.... I get it.

That doesn't apply to my use case because I have a custom signup wizard with many other options that let me tweak that behavior. So I don't need the wpmu core to do that through site options.

Any other examples you guys can think of?

[Andrea_R]

No, we're the ones being dense. you hit on a simple way around things.

I'm telling you ya don't need the plugin.

[bui4ever]

See, for me that doesn't work.

Sure, when you clone the first few it works, but the ones I do after that, choosing the exact same options every time, leave me unable to access the new blogs as site admin.

Being able to use the sub-blogs as another mu-install is a lesser issue for me. Being able to access them as site admin is kinda a given.

And I've tried this with different version of MU on 3 different servers.

Also, if you read thru the plugin itself, it does not actually follow any of the outlined steps that everyone manually goes through. ID's actually wind up slightly off too.

Another issue is when the bog is initially created, you get a "No WPMU site defined on this host" until you go edit any blog field. Doesn't matter, just edit something and save and somehow it sets itself to rights.

I'm not trying to harp on anything here, but I really hate seeing one bad option out there. When you get into more enterprisey type sites and business applications, and people have some serious money riding on this, it's a lame effort.

(why yes, we are trying to sit down and whip up something better. only 24 hours in a day tho)

That's so odd! I have some 15 sites and cloning has been working fine for me. Could it be the host?

[bui4ever]

@bui4ever - Everything you described I can do with WPMU and a SINGLE SITE...

So let me be clear... OF COURSE, WPMU is totally the way to go.

I'm wondering if there are security issues with doing a global wildcard? I'm thinking someone with a domain.tld can point their nameservers to your DNS, although they would need the domain.tld to be fully parked in order to have the domain.tld and your server to sync up...but I dunno.

The biggest issue with all this domain mapping is the xml-rpc and how it basically stops working correctly. Have you been able to use the xml-rpc on any or all of your sites?

[ron_r]

@bui4ever - different hosts.

@zap - Lately I've been finding uses for the site meta table. But, it would not take a significant amount of work to re-write a plugin using the site meta to include the domain in the key.

[ZappoMan]

@bui4ever - I will check the xml-rpc... I tested it in the past and it seemed to work fine, my read of the code doesn't make me think site would play into it at all since by the time the xml-rpc is even running, wpmu has already set up the blog globals and everything thinks it's running in a single blog by that point.

@ron_r - re: site meta... There are definitely things that make sense to store in site meta... for example several of my plugins that deal with system wide things use site meta as a handle place to store configuration, etc. And if you want to host two totally different "sites" I agree... the system should support that, and clearly that's what site_id's are for. I guess I'm saying, I am not sure there's that much value in it.

So here's the conclusion I'm now reaching...

If you are using WPMU to help host a bunch of individual blogs, say you're doing what wp.com does... and you are offering 2 features...

1) Generic end users can sign up and join your generic community... the are all dropped into a the same "blog structure" of either "blogname.domain.com" or "domain.com/blogname"... you've implemented things like "random blog", "top blog", "recent posts", "recent comments", "tag surfer", etc etc, and these features operate across this "single domain space"... Clearly this is 1 site. There is no need for more than 1 site.

2) You ALSO support the ability for some blogs in that site to have a CUSTOM domain. Again borrowing the wp.com example, if one of those blogs is "webworkerdaily.com", then you really don't need to make it a separate site. You can leave that blog in the same "site" grouping, and simply adjust the blog specifc urls to point to the correct domain. This is the EASIEST (IMO) and probably the safest most obvious thing to do. You're the site admin, you don't plan to let the customer have site admin rights, they don't need it. You actually WANT the posts, comments, tags, etc from this blog to appear in your community, since you're all about the big giant roll up of content, and you actually want this high quality content to feed into the pool of your random broad based content anyway.... You should still stick with 1 site. There is no need for more than 1 site.

--- HOWEVER ---

Imagine a different scenerio... Let's say you are a SaaS provider for a two different vertical blog networks. One of them is for Cat lovers and one is for Dog lovers. You don't want these two sites to know that you're hosting the other site, because after all Cats and Dogs don't get along.

In this case, you sort of want two separate instances of item 1 above...

1) The Cat site - End users who love cats can signup and post about how great cats are. They can complain about how aweful dogs are... they get "top posts", "top comments", "tag surfer", etc... but all the content is about Cats.

2) The Dog site - same thing.... except for Dogs.

Now, if one day someone on the Dog site posts about how his dog loves to eat cats, and there's a flood of people in the Dog blogs cheering for cat-o-cide.... then this is clearly a case where you're hoping neither site notices that other... God forbid the Cat lovers find out that you're hosting this anti-cat society.

In this case I can imagine that  you want two sites.... and you want to make sure all your "site wide" plugins really do a good job of respecting the site_id setting.

Notice that in this case "custom domains" really don't matter or even have to come up... Of course, you may also support custom domains... like maybe most of your blogs are "blogname.catblogs.com" and "blogname.dogblogs.com" but you also have a cat store that asks for a custom domain of "cat-lovers-are-us.com" and a dog store called "bigdogz.com" or whatever... but the point is that "CUSTOM DOMAINS" and "MULTI SITES" are two totally different features.

So... I guess this is my long winded way of saying...

I now understand the value of Multi-sites... and I stand by the fact that you PROBABLY don't need it, unless you are really trying to run two totally different vertical blog networks where you explicitly don't want content shared across the blog networks... AND... more over... if this is really what you want... then I bet 90% of all plugins out there DO NOT support this.

Example: The friends plugin on wpmudev.org... doesn't pay attention to sites... it's all user based and so someone could easily find a user in one of the other blog verticals.

As I consider this more deeply, I am almost convinced that if you really wanted to keep these two communities separate, you'd find it impossible to do with a single instance of WPMU just using sites. Certainly you can segregate blogs... but in order for you to segregate users you have to project them through the blog layer, and there's not a lot of support for that in the standard wpmu schema.

Ahhh.... phew... did any one get to the end of this post?

[Andrea_R]

I'm wondering if there are security issues with doing a global wildcard? I'm thinking someone with a domain.tld can point their nameservers to your DNS, although they would need the domain.tld to be fully parked in order to have the domain.tld and your server to sync up...but I dunno.

They can do that all they like - MU handles the rest, and if MU doesn't find any mention of the domain, it just shows the original site.

And yeah, I've done this on 3 completey seperate servers hosting at three vastly different companies (rackspace being one), on multiple accounts, and have had the same results

As I consider this more deeply, I am almost convinced that if you really wanted to keep these two communities separate, you'd find it impossible to do with a single instance of WPMU just using sites. Certainly you can segregate blogs... but in order for you to segregate users you have to project them through the blog layer, and there's not a lot of support for that in the standard wpmu schema.

Correct! Exactly.  I came up across this on another instance where we thought maybe it would be easier to run half a dozen MU installs off one codebase, but when I said it wasn't completely separated - if something not found or goes wrong, you wind up at the main install, for instance, then it was decided to go with separate installs.

Yeah, I think we're going to have to start distinguishing between the custom domain feature and the multi-site capabilities.

[ron_r]

Ahhh.... phew... did any one get to the end of this post?

Yep

[trent]

I have found with the latest beta release of WPMU 2.6 (same as trac) the way the cookies are now using the authorization salts, this solution that Zap has mentioned doesn't work to login anymore.   Before you could login to the domain that is mapped, but not with the newer releases.    It will still show the domain and the content, but no way to login to create more!

Anyone have some thoughts on getting around this one?    It still would work best with the way that wp.com has with the backend dashboard being blog1.maindomain.com and the front end just passing forward the domain2.com.    I haven't been able to negotiate how to do that yet though....

Trent

[Luke]

Ah, but what you forget is that you're also logged into the mapped domain as well. Comments, admin edit links, etc.

So, you "have" to be logged into the domain, and once you are, what's the difference?

[trent]

For example:

If I am setup blog2.domain.com to be changed to domain2.com I cannot login to domain2.com/ as it redirects me right back to the login page even with the right user credentials.   

That is what I mean.

trent

[Luke]

I completely grasp what your issue is. My reference is that admin on the original blog domain is more cosmetic than anything.

[ZappoMan]

So, I don't know for sure how the stock install works... because I wrote my own custom login plugin... Someday, we will get around to releasing it under appropriate Open Source license...

But.... my plugin is really all that complex, so I can describe the idea (actually I think I had a discussion with Luke about this on "the other forum"... Luke, you are Lunabyte, right?)

Anyway.... here's what my plugin does...

1) It allows implementing a sidebar widget for login in to the "current domain".
2) It traps wp-login.php and remaps to a different URL (security by obscurity)
3) It detects if you are logging in to "seconddomain.com" and will (based on configuration) log you in to both seconddomain.com and masterdomain.com. It does this using chained redirects in the background and seems to work fine with the latest versions of the salty login credentials....

So... my users get the behavior I am expecting which is this....

1) If you login at seconddomain.com, then you are logged in to both seconddomain.com and masterdomain.com
2) If you login to masterdomain.com, you still need to log in to seconddomain.com... I imagine I could change this, but I didn't really want to log in to EVERY domain, just the single custom domain and the master domain.

I have tested this with 2.5/1.5 but not with 2.6/1.6 or the latest trac build.

Hope that helps.

[trent]

Ah, I get your point Luke.     That is why ZappoMan's setup works for him due to his plugin for the login.   All makes sense now.

Trent

[ZappoMan]

Oh yeah... and I'm sure that the login issue has nothing to do with sites... it's a domain thing.

Actually, even in the old login credentials, you still needed some kind of a solution like the one I implemented to be logged in to "two domains at once".... I don't think this is related to "salty credentials".

By the way, I like that phrase... "salty credentials".

[Luke]

Maybe, can't say for sure with 2.6 yet.

Although, wasn't someone having login troubles on sub domains? Might be related, but I dunno.

Oh yeah... and I'm sure that the login issue has nothing to do with sites... it's a domain thing.

Actually, even in the old login credentials, you still needed some kind of a solution like the one I implemented to be logged in to "two domains at once".... I don't think this is related to "salty credentials".

By the way, I like that phrase... "salty credentials".

I'll have to disagree about being logged into 2 sites at once.