WordPress Network on Dreamhost

I’m just copying these instructions here, since I can’t seem to reliably access the website they are currently hosted on.

I think I’m going to change a few ways things are hosted here on my collection of sites.  It is a pain to keep them all updated and managed.  Therefore, I am looking into migrating to a WordPress Network (Multi-Site) setup.  However, using subdomains doesn’t work with Dreamhost because of Dreamhost not allowing wildcards.

Here is the work-around (verbatim) from a fellow Dreamhost user.

  1. Fol­low the direc­tions for set­ting up your Word­Press mul­ti­site (I will assume that you already know or have found the direc­tions to do so).
  2. Pick the sub­do­main fea­ture while in setup.
  3. Ignore the mes­sage you get say­ing that things may not work prop­erly because of the Wild­card missing.
  4. When you’ve fol­lowed all those won­der­ful instruc­tions, cre­ate a test blog. You may end up with a URL like domain.comdatabase_name. I did, and con­tinue to do so. Just edit that blog’s set­tings (Super Admin -> Sites -> Edit) so that the Path field only has a / in it. I’m unsure if this is a prob­lem that user’s at other hosts have, or if it is exclu­sive and will soon be fixed, but once it is changed all is well.
  5. Go to your Dreamhost Web Panel and mir­ror a sub­do­main for the blog you just added to the domain you set the mul­ti­site up on. NOTE: If you cre­ate blog.domain.comin Word­Press mul­ti­site, you must cre­ate the same sub­do­main in your Web Panel — blog.domain.com. Visit blog.domain.com and ver­ify that it leads you to the new blog you created.
  6. If that works, then you need to install the Domain Map­ping plu­gin for multisite.
  7. This gives you a new menu to add a domain to your net­work and “park” it over a subdomain.
  8. All you have to do is fol­low the direc­tions there to add the domain, and you are set.
  9. Just mir­ror that same domain to the mul­ti­site domain in your Dreamhost Web Panel, and every­thing should be in work­ing order.

Now on to testing!