What I’ve done is create a subdomain like ‘NOC dot mydomain dot com’ and use that as primary for the network… NOC stands for Network Operations Center… Makes me feel like I’m running a huge, substantial network. Maybe someday it will be.
You’ll then use ‘NOC’ for network operations of course and point your original domain at a subsite… House your content there on that subsite once you make these changes. You’ll actually always have a site admin subsection on every ‘site’ like you would have had for a non-multisite.
All your network admin stuff will be at the ‘NOC’.
Half-Elf wrote up some pretty good directions that should work even if you have a domain mapping plugin here.
https://halfelf.org/2014/changing-domain-name-multisite/
You’ll need to move your content around (migrate) from the main site to the new home site for your old domain…
You might instead use the built-in WordPress multisite mapping capabilities now to map the domains around.
Do create a current backup in case you break things. This isn’t all that big a task but there’s plenty of places to break things.
As to placing the admin off on its own domain or subdomain… It could be done but I don’t think that would be all that useful and it’s a very non-standard change that might break things later when you update WordPress.
@jnashhawkins
Thanks! Actually I already have a NOC type of domain that manages the network but for each site, I have a domain name pointing to the same directory. The network config then associates the domain with the right site ID. What I don’t understand clearly from your explanation is what you mean with moving the content. Do you mean moving the content from the database to another site id? Your last paragraph somehow forced me to think about something else to avoid doing something unnatural.
Despite the fact that I may not have understood correctly your explanation, it made me think about something else (or maybe that is what you meant after all) 🙂
My goal is to use my own front end and this front-end is using a database extraction from the site I want to move. Let’s assume that the site I want to move has id 99, it means I have all the usual wp_99 type of tables in the database. Now, my front end could perfectly fetch the data from another site ID. So the idea would be to move the content of wp_99 something to a new id like wp_100 and associate another domain to that new id (could be my NOC domain). So whenever I want to manage the content, i login through this other domain that has no front end and my front end on the initial domain would retrieve the content from site id 100. I don’t know if my explanation is clear, let me know if it doesn’t make sense.
