Nested sites without multiple installations

  • Aaron Wagner

    (@ajwagner777)


    15 years, 2 months ago

    I have seen this question asked in other places on this forum but without any workable solution. Here is the scenario. We are considering moving our university website into wordpress, but the one thing that is holding me back right now is the ability to have nested sites, at a level higher than the first “folder” level.

    Consider this URL: http://www.sph.uth.tmc.edu/research/
    This needs to be a site managed by our Office of Research. No problem, right? Well add to that, that I need this URL: http://www.sph.uth.tmc.edu/research/centers/cep/ to be another site, managed by a totally different group. I can lose the “centers” portion of the URL, but that seems incidental to this requirement.

    Categories and adding things to the permalink structure is not really an option because these need to be distinct sites, managed by different, but sometimes overlapping groups.

    One solution that I have seen is doing nested installs. This is a bad idea for us because I am a 1-person web department and don’t have the resources to manage 10+ installs of wordpress.

    Given that worpress already has the ability to emulate folder structures, this should not be a huge undertaking. I am willing to entertain ideas of using the web.config (I am on IIS) and the URL rewrite module to accomplish this, but I am not 100% sure how to move forward.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Tim Moore

    (@tmoorewp)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    At my university, our solution has been to redirect URLs in Apache (or IIS in your case). In your example, we’d create a site at /research/ and another one at /research-cep/, then redirect the /research/centers/cep/ URL to /research-cep/ from within IIS/Apache (that way it is handled before WordPress sees the request).

    We’re in the same boat with staffing. This has been the easiest solution for us.

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    Tim, if you could do a write-up or tutorial on how to get those nested folders, I’m not the only one who woudl appreciate it. 😉

    Tim Moore

    (@tmoorewp)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    Sure thing 🙂

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    *cough* blog guest post *cough*

    Thread Starter Aaron Wagner

    (@ajwagner777)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    I think we might be headed in the right direction. I am not a huge fan of that proposal, but what if we did a URL rewrite of /research-cep/ to /research/cep/? I realize that the former is still a rewrite, but can you do a rewrite of a rewrite?

    Tim Moore

    (@tmoorewp)

    15 years, 2 months ago

    You could probably set something up with Apache’s ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse in mod_proxy, though it’s going to add some overhead to your web server.

    I know my proposal won’t give you /research/cep/ in the finished URL’s, but it at least gives you the capability of having nested URLs for advertising and linking.

    tnoskilz

    (@tnoskilz)

    14 years, 4 months ago

    Any luck with this? I’d love to see the details if you worked out a method using rewrites to get the nested subfolders for SEO.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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