I’ve spent a good chunk of time this week transitioning AFdN from a standalone WordPress site to be part of the ferguson.pw WordPress Multisite cluster.
This is more cool for me than you because I now only have to manage one WordPress installation for everyone, rather than two or more installations. Huzzah!
Some lessons learned:
- Multisite cookies are the suck. Towards the end of the migration I ran into an issue where draft post previews were not working. I started running through my checklist of things that could be the cause, but nothing made sense. I eventually created a new user —
notandrew
— to see it was an issue limited my “super-administrator” capabilities and to my surprisenotandrew
could see the previews just fine. So I nuked all cookies for ferguson.pw domain and lo and behold everything worked. - When migrating a Standalone WordPress site to a Multisite and mapping the domain back to the original URL you can use the following Nginx rewrite to prevent breaking anything1:
#rewrite for WordPress single site to multisite location /wp-content/uploads/ { rewrite "^(/wp-content/uploads)/([0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*)" $1/sites/$blogid/$2; }
Note: this is also predicated on using the Nginx
Map{..}
directive. - There’s a long standing bug with Nginx regarding the use of
alias
versusroot
. In the end I was able to usealias
2 to host a special directory for TweetNest. Here’s the solution I ultimately arrived at:location /tweetnest { alias /path/to/example.com/html/tweetnest; rewrite ^/tweetnest/sort /tweetnest/sort.php; rewrite ^/tweetnest/favorites /tweetnest/favorites.php; rewrite ^/tweetnest/search /tweetnest/search.php; rewrite ^/tweetnest/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)? /tweetnest/day.php?y=$1&m=$2&d=$3; rewrite ^/tweetnest/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)? /tweetnest/month.php?y=$1&m=$2; location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(/.*)?$; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } }
I also took the opportunity to clear out some cruft and update some look and feel stuff: redish/orangish theme, update profile, etc. Nothing should be broken, but you never know. Enjoy your weekend.
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