rphair

OK, thanks @benjamin, I can see that the code is at that link too. The inline comments correspond exactly to those in the larger file. And, unless I’ve missed it, at the source web site there is still no high-level description of all the class functions that correspond to these Storage & Mapper objects.

If the plugin is truly lacking that kind of high-level description, it means that themers have to reverse-engineer an API based on going through the code… whether it is one massive file or dozens of little ones, the difficulty is the same.

There is an additional problem: our web site broke in this case because a previous designer relied upon an array reference in the legacy code to determine the gallery path. Now, in the current version, the same data is available only in an object-oriented system. Unless the API for the Gallery data is documented anywhere, there is no assurance we would be able to correct our web site quickly, or at all, if it were to change again.

Your last response suggested I thought the problem was “too many lines of code in the file.” That’s not the problem at all… it’s that the plugin appears to be undocumented. Developers need a documented API to work with other people’s code: that’s the bottom line all over the industry. I appreciate your help, but if we don’t get a positive response about this documentation in code or online, we will have to assume it doesn’t exist and look for something more developer-friendly.

to illustrate: we are just trying to determine the Gallery Path from the Gallery ID as shown on this screen:

http://cosd.com/stuff/ngg-gid-to-pathname.jpg

There is some good documentation in /wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules but I haven’t yet found a description of the arrays or objects that the plugins are working with. It would be wonderful to have this information, but in the meantime our site is down until we can find a mapping between the gallery ID & gallery pathnames and put it back into our custom theme.

I see & probably my “reset” of the clearfix wasn’t working because of a CSS specificity problem. Your explicit declaration of the correct properties for the print view in the #content element fixes that.

I’ve added your extra code to the Frontier parent theme (version 1.2.3) rather than the child style.css, so it will be consistent with future versions even if you change things a bit. Thanks for the excellent support.

dear Cory: thank you so much for tuning in and for providing and supporting such a great plugin. Yes, you are right, the default PHP installation on Amazon EC2 was missing mbstring. I’ve installed it and now the Duplicator packages are building properly with no errors.

BTW for others on AWS Amazon Linux: this is done by adding the package according to your version of PHP, e.g.:

php56-mbstring
php55-mbstring
php54-mbstring
php-mbstring

Web server also needs to be restarted afterwards.

Thanks @ron, I think we have enough information here to mark this issue as resolved. For our own two- or three-site network I think I am OK with the work/issues, since nobody has suggested any specific way around them so far and the plugin has made our simple site work as planned.

Once I personally have a better understanding of how WordPress Permalinks work, perhaps we will be able to do the desired thing with some mod_rewrite rules and then we could deactivate the plugin. Even better if the WP development team could make domain mapping part of the mainstream.

After a fourth day of trial and error I have found a solution. This will be obvious to people having experience with this plugin and/or Multi-Site networks, but that is exactly why we needed help in the first place.

The site configuration, as originally described in the first posting, was mostly working. We only needed to visit Network Admin > Sites and Edit each of our subfolder sites to show the Settings tab, then set the Siteurl parameter to our desired URL for each mapped domain. Obviously (?) this needs to be done after the domain mapping is set up, so as not to break the sites.

Prior to making this change, Siteurl still showed the sub-folder sites in our network. This is why the unmapped domains kept showing up in all our URLs. Our sites are now bouncing merrily along on the domains sl.cosd.com and st.cosd.com.

Contrary to what @ron said above, we have everything working now without having any Primary domain set. Furthermore, setting a Primary domain in any configuration described above has caused the domain mapping and/or URL resolution on all other sites to break.

I have created all the major site components so far like Blog entries with pretty permalinks, CMS pages, custom menus, and swapped the Home and Blog pages, and so far it’s all working. We have one or two more plugins to install that will utilise the Multi-Site configuration and if there are any general problems I will post here.

I am not trying to be either a hero or a fault-finder, but I think this is a case in point that this plugin could use some documentation addressing the above case, and in general illustrating more practical examples and how to achieve them. I’ll be happy to mark this topic as “resolved” if we see any responses to that effect.

Reinstalling the site with subdomains didn’t work either. When installing our site as sl.cosd.com, our only option for creating a Site was to set it up as st.sl.cosd.com which we then mapped to st.cosd.com .

The main site sl.cosd.com then worked as predicted, but the mapped domain st.cosd.com would then redirect to sl.cosd.com/wp-signup.php?new=54.76.48.242 which displays the content Greetings Site Administrator! You are currently allowing “none” registrations. To change or disable registration go to your Options page.

I appreciate that this plugin is available but I am really frustrated that we can’t find a single example anywhere on the Internet about how this is supposed to be set up for anything other than a “hierarchy” of sites and nested DNS domains. I’ve seen from other postings that people have gotten Domain Mapping to work when the domain mappings were arbitrary… doesn’t wordpress.com itself work this way?

Please, if I may start this question anew: We are just trying to set up a basic test case with these characteristics:

1. WordPress is installed on an IP address (since there will be no web site there, and because we don’t want difficulties changing a “primary” site name when we move from development to production).
2. Then we set up a multisite network on this site, create two Sites on the multisite network, and install the Domain Mapping plugin.
3. Then we map two development domains (sl.cosd.com and st.cosd.com) to these Sites, and build our sites there.
4. When done, we map our two production domains to these sites, and fix the links in our content accordingly.

We don’t know, and don’t really care, whether this is done with a sub-domain or sub-folder installation, as long as we know which one to use and why. We just please need the help of someone familiar with this plugin to please briefly explain how to set up a domain mapping for a new site with the above qualities, since the plugin instructions don’t have this level of detail.

If there is anything wrong with the premise above, we would really appreciate the help of someone who has some experience with the Domain Mapping plugin to briefly, but accurately, describe the next closest thing that will be possible.

This would be a common testing & development scenario and I am sure this will benefit many WordPress designers. If we can just be prompted in right direction I will post complete instructions here when we have it working.

dear @ron, thank you so much. I have set sl.cosd.com as the primary domain, and now it is serving that subfolder site’s content under that primary domain.

The other domain, st.cosd.com, still redirects to 54.76.48.242/st without our mapping having any effect.

What else could I have missed? Do I need to reinstall the site using subdomains instead of subfolders, as suggested in that other thread?