/wp-nester

WordPress plugin to nest subdirectory sites in a network.

Primary LanguagePHP

WP Nester

This WordPress plugin makes it possible to nest sites under other sites in a WordPress network with subdirectory sites.

For example, by using this plugin, all of the following can be valid WordPress sites in the example.com WordPress network.

  • mysite.com
  • mysite.com/first
  • mysite.com/first/second/
  • mysite.com/first/second/third
  • mysite.com/fourth

Installation

You must have installed WordPress and created a network.

  1. Move the wp-nester folder into mu-plugins.

  2. Move sunrise.php into the root of your wp-content folder. If sunrise.php is already present there, then merge in the contents.

  3. Edit wp-config.php and uncomment or add the SUNRISE definition line. If it does not exist, paste the following on the line above the last require_once command.

     define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );

  4. Update your the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress installation to contain the following.

     # BEGIN WordPress
 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /wordpress/
 RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

 # add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
 RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
 RewriteRule ^ - [L]
 RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)+(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
 RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
 RewriteRule . index.php [L]
 </IfModule>

 # END WordPress

Creating Nested Sites

Unfortunately, there is a snag when creating sites. We are looking for ways around it, but it's impossible without editing the WordPress core. So you have two options:

  1. Apply the the diff file site-new.diff. If you view source you'll see that we only need to add one character, but it's crucial. You could use something like this command in your WordPress install folder.

     patch -p1 </path/to/wp-nester/site-new.diff

    OR

  2. Create sites first with an un-nested URL such as example-site, and then edit them afterwards to be nested, like subsite/example-site. This avoids the error that you'll receive if you attempt to create a site with a nested URL initially.

Versions

Currently only tested with WordPress 3.6 and 3.8.1.

Acknowledgements

Our work is based heavily on the code represented in the following post and comments.