Part 2
I needed to have one of the three sites as the “main” site, the hosting URL, the base for the other sites. I exported that from my test network as a standalone site, then imported it to the client’s hosting account on GoDaddy all using BUB. Once it was working on it’s own URL as a standalone site, I began the process of making that site the base for the multi-site set up, again, following the codex instructions.
The next steps and how well it all works is quite dependent on the hosting provider, and your preference for subdomains or subfolders. I chose to use subdomains, so I had to create the subdomains on the primary URL. Then I had to set up the actual domain URL’s to point to the corresponding subdomain nameservers. It’s easy to get confused, and impatient waiting for the URL’s to resolve and propagate. I tried several configurations, in some cases not waiting long enough for things to resolve before trying something else (thinking it wasn’t working), and had to call GoDaddy to reset some things because I had too many requests in at the same time and nothing was working! Be sure to leave yourself plenty of time (days!) to get this all set up for a client.
I then took each of the other two sites, exported from my testing server as a single site using BUB, and imported into the multisite install, again using BackUpBuddy. I can’t say enough about how well BUB worked to move sites! A few link checks and minor changes were all I had to tweak – everything else imported and transferred to the new URL’s so smoothly…worth every penny!!
Here’s a quick screenshot of the Dashboard:
The end result is 3 distinct websites – and one WordPress install to manage all three. The sites are: