Depts

Got sysadmins to create a virtual domain name (inke.uvic.ca) and point it to the directory on our server containing the root of the etcl wp install. Fine. Problem is that all the internal navigation in WP uses hard-coded URLs. Some of those are actual paths to files in the wp structure, others are partially paths and partially arguments which are passed to the mysql db. In principle it's very difficult to modify only and all the URLs which are partially arguments.

The WP help documentation and plugins regarding this kind of thing all assume that the wp instance is at the root of the server, which is not the case for us. The docs say that it's pretty hard to do this if you have a multi-blog instance and it is not at the root. I tried installing and running the plugin and sure enough it told me that it would work only if the instance was in the root of the server.

Next attempt was to write some redirects in the htaccess file so that if the URL incoming contained the old domain name to reroute to the same file but at the new domain name. As far as I can tell, something within WP caused this to become an infinite recursion, so that obviously didn't work.

Next tried to modify values in the mysql database based on http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

in table wp_blogs
originally
domain:hcmc.uvic.ca
path:/~etcl/wordpress/inke/
revised to
domain:inke.uvic.ca
path:/

in table wp_2_options
originally
siteurl: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke/
home: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke/
fileupload_url: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke/files
revised to
siteurl: http://inke.uvic.ca/
home: http://inke.uvic.ca/
fileupload_url: http://inke.uvic.ca/files

in table wp_2_posts

UPDATE `wp_2_posts`
SET guid=(
REPLACE (guid,
'hcmc.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke/',
'inke.uvic.ca/'));

That spewed a lot of errors in the site. The change in the guid had no apparent effect, but the other modifications were obviously being applied to not only inke-specific references, but references to the etcl wp installation, and those failed.

Undid the changes, so everything is as it was. inke.uvic.ca points at the home page for the site, but otherwise all inke pages are in the domain hcme.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke. If you manually replace hcmc.uvic.ca/~etcl/wordpress/inke with inke.uvic.ca, the page loads properly, so that virtual domain is certainly working, just does not look like we're going to be able to get a multiple-blog wp instance to use that virtual domain name.

Sysadmin advises to put each blog in its own instance of WP.