Mapping Domains with WPMu

I’m on a roll baby, somebody stop me! Woooho…

Russian Dolls

Mapping domains to WPMu –the next frontier is already here! I’m sure many of you know that WordPress.com has already figured out how to enable users to map their own domain to their WP.com account. This is a pretty cool feature and the first time I saw it in action was with Jon Udell’s blog, which is a good omen in my mind 🙂

So, I have been thinking about this for a little while now, and I know that Dr. Mike (Ohhh, the great Dr. Mike!) had come up with a workaround for WPMu until their is some stable plugin that will afford this feature. Richard Bui took the relevant pieces from the WPMu forums and came up with a step-by-step tutorial for mapping domains to WPMu here. A brilliantly done tutorial that makes this process that much easier to even consider. So, if I can convince Zach at Cast Iron Coding to let me play a little bit, I am going to try and map a domain to UMW Blogs. Which domain you ask? Well, of course. After my little rant against Bluehost I got to thinking, why aren’t we running our blogs through WPMu, well because of our fetishized attachment to our domains (I know I’m guilty). So, what if we could park our domains on the sering hosting our WPMu install, and just map them accordingly?

This can only be accomplished with dynamic subdomains, and is really a long term boon to this system. let me give you a far better example than . Right now Cathy Derecki is working on developing some skins for the Semiologic theme that will be a way for faculty to create a quick and easy web space to create a quick and easy personal page, or even blog, etc. You an see an example of one of these sites in action here and here. So, it works fine, no problem, a couple of more tweaks and this is a really easy way to have ll faculty get a website they don’t have to author with that Dreamweaver nonsense. Great, the only issue may come when they see the domain. “What the hell? I’m not putting my personal site on the UMW Blogs domain!” (I am interpolating here for the UMW faculty actually would do it cause they are badass!) Well, in the case there is a general revolt we can buy the umwprofs.org domain for 8 bucks and map it to one blog. Thereafter, we can have subdomains created off of this new domain, isn’t that sick! A multi-user within a multi-user. A quantum multi-user!

I saw this in step 35 of Richard Bui’s write-up:

35. Now another cool feature of the domain mapping, is that you can also create subdomain blogs off of the newly mapped domain. I can create http://how-to.abunchofcars.com and users can also sign up for their own blogs as they do on the main site. Cool huh?

Radical! So, if I were to push for a dedicated server for UMW Blogs, this would be my angle. With a dedicated, externally hosted server we can do this as many times as we want, and out come the Russian dolls!

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6 Responses to Mapping Domains with WPMu

  1. Cathy Finn-Derecki says:

    Very sick indeed. I’m now working on using the subdirectory option in applying WPMU as a CMS, and am finding it to be rather buggy. But, I will troll on and report on my eventual success at the appropriate time. WPMU RULES, BABY!!!!

  2. jimgroom says:

    Go, Cathy, go!

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  5. demonicume says:

    will this ever be a possibility for subdirectory installs, you think?

    curt

  6. jimgroom says:

    Curt,

    I’m really not sure, I have to admit that’s beyond me. I think the forums are far smarter about that stuff (which you are a most helpful member who I have gotten tons from thank you). I just take all of your good work and try and make sense of it 🙂

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