You are correct, replicating WP files shouldn’t be necessary with multisite. There are sometimes incompatibility issues with multisite. When only two or three sites are involved, some prefer to run multiple single site instances to avoid multisite issues. The concept begins to fall apart when dozens of sites are involved.
Have you tried using the default export/import tool to clone your site?
Not really my concern, but are you sure you need multisite to manage different brands? Wouldn’t that cause inconvenience to customers who want to purchase multiple brands? Wouldn’t they need to log in and purchase each brand separately? I’d think staying on one cohesive site would be more advantageous. Couldn’t you manage the difference between brands through categories or another taxonomy instead of by site? I don’t know your business, feel free to ignore this and do as you like.
Thanks for the response. After talking to the fourth person from tech support, they shed some light and told me that what tech support had me to do the first time (copy the files) was indeed totally incorrect. I managed to get it working the other day, but am now having an issue with it throwing a 500 error. I think I’ve narrowed the new issue down to something with the mapping. Working at it little by little as I have time.
My current website is setup to allow you to shop multiple brands at once. What will put it in perspective for you is that when I say “brands” I mean “brands” that I created to service a certain customer group and not “brands” like clothing brands for example (like Nike, Adidas, etc). I have a brand that is specific to first responders, another for car enthusiasts, another specifically for Mustang enthusiasts and two more totally different brands coming soon. Since I get feedback from my customers saying that I offer a lot of products that don’t pertain to them and can sometimes be overwhelming. After much thought, my solution is to separate my brands and give them a unique website that is more attractive to that specific market that I’m selling to. Kind of tough to explain, but I think if you went to my site sccgear.com, you’ll understand why I’m making the change! They are referred to as product lines currently on my site, but when making the change, I’m changing how they are referred to as brands.
Thanks for explaining, your approach makes sense now. I have a client who has done something similar, though he only needed a few sites to market his services to very different sectors.
500 errors can be bitch, they can be caused by nearly anything, but generally something is coded in a way that it shouldn’t be, or the data involved is not as expected. To eliminate potential sources of the issue, deactivate all plugins and use a default theme like twentytwenty. Watch out for must use plugins, rename the /mu-plugins/ folder to deactivate those.
Be sure you’ve correctly setup multisite according to Settings > Netwrk Setup (in network admin). Wp should work without error now. To narrow down the cause, incrementally restore your normal configuration until the problem recurs.
I’m actually getting a few different errors… I’ve been making changes on cPanel settings for the subdomains. The original error was “[an error occurred while processing this directive] ” and then after I “fixed” the subdomain in cPanel to point to the same directory, I’m getting the error 500. When I make check the error logs, it shows it’s throwing a 404. I think in order for me to get to where I can work on it and narrow it down to find “the” problem, I either have to contact Bluehost and have them change something on the server or move the site out of my development folder to be in public_html. Although I have my subdomains linking to public_html/development, does it have to be in just public_html to work? If it does, then there may be where my problem is. If not, I think it has to do with a server setting.
I have already undid all the plugins, themes, etc. Unfortunately, that didn’t help and there was still an issue with the added sites to the multi-site. The primary site worked before and after I did that just fine.
AFAIK subdomain based networks must be installed in public_html or whatever the public root folder is on your server. It was definitely the case a while back, I’m unsure of current versions, but it’s sounding like from your experience it’s still the case. That said, I’m not sure this rule really applies in your situation.
Typically, we would not use vhosts (hosting cPanel subdomain redirects) to manage where network subdomain requests go, so they land in the public root network for WP to interpret. When you use vhosts, the destination folder in a sense becomes “public root” for that subdomain, so I’d think the network would still work as intended, provided any sub-sites added also have their respective subdomains added to vhosts as well. I’ve done something similar in the past, except the it was the primary domain that was redirected through vhosts. That may be a crucial difference though. There could be issues in cPanel where it will not let you add subdomains that redirect to a folder that does not exist, so my theory here may be moot.
I copied everything to the public_html and I was still getting a few error messages (only one error instead of three). I decided to make my next area to work on the subdomains/new URL’s and to get those working. After a few changes, it FINALLY seems to work! It all went back to the configuration of the subdomains and DNS on cPanel. Once I got them pointed correctly, it all seems to work well without error (so far anyway… lol). Thanks for sharing your knowledge to get me going in the right direction!
