elthomas

Hello,

thank you for the detailed answer. It makes sense and it helps!

Yes, I use domain mapping, it is correct. I don’t use a domain mapping plugging because now, this functionality is a native feature in WordPress (codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/WordPress_Multisite_Domain_Mapping).

I use relative URL in the content of the posts/pages of my template site (the one I need to clone). However, in the theme customizer, relative URLs can’t be used (for example, to select the header image of the theme, I can only select an image in the theme customizer but I can’t modify the URL => it’s not possible to use relative URL here). It is this second point that creates broken url in my “cloning” process.

I understand as well that the plugin can create only subdomain website, since WordPress as well doesn’t allow to create directly a website with a different domain. And I understand that modifying that isn’t a good idea 😉
By default, the process to create a website with domain mapping in WordPress is:

1. Create a subdomain website
2. Change the Site Address to put the final domain

If the new site is still empty at point 2 (no theme customization), changing the Site Address doesn’t broke anything.

My problem is that my template site has its theme customzed and then, uses absolute URL.

However, I have thought to a solution to avoid broken links in the theme customization data of my template site.
I will simply go in the database to edit there the theme customization saved data and change absolute URL by relative URL. And that’s it! I will have a a template site without absolute URL, cleaned to be cloned 🙂

Cheers!