Adding the WordPress Multisite feature to an existing site

I’ve had this site as my main blog site for a number of years now, but I also keep another site for past projects that I’ve worked on. It’s been a static HTML site for a number of years and gone through a number of revisions, but I wanted to move it to WordPress to make it easier to edit changes directly on the site instead of the normal editing HTML and FTP’ing to the site workflow.

Since this site is already using WordPress, I thought I’d take a look at the Multisite feature to avoid having multiple installs on my Apache server. Turns out starting this late into the evening was probably not the best idea, but after a few hours I finally got it all fixed up. Here’s some key resources:

• Enabling WordPress Multisite and creating a Network
• This article seems to be frequently pointed to from many other posts as a good guide for setting up your Multisite and your Network of Sites
• Setting up with Multisite MU Domain Mapping plugin

Key things that I learnt:

• If you have an existing site, saw www.example.com and you follow all the steps in the above articles, using the subdomain approach you’ll end up with your existing domain as example.com and other sites as subdomain1.example.com, subdomain2.example.com etc. Not wanting to break existing links to my existing site at www.example.com, you could either put in place Apache rewriting, or the  approach I took was to copy my previous posts across to a new subdomain mapped as the original URL, www.example.com
• To set up the above:
  • export the existing posts using Tools/Export
  • Create a new site and map it to www.example.com
  • Import your exported data into the new site
  • You can now delete the original posts in the original site that’s now mapped to exmaple.com. If it makes sense, create new content for this top site.