Tag: hacks

As of WordPress 3.1 you can NO LONGER remove the blog slug via the method described in this post! – Feb 28 2011

Warning: WordPress MultiSite is not for the newbie!

Most people I know who are using MultiSite (formerly WPMU) are people who have always been using that fork of WordPress. With the advent of MultiSite, a built in way for people to move from single ‘blog’ installs of WordPress to a multiple site structure, more and more users want to move to it, which is great. But. There are some weird ‘problems’ with MultiSite that cause a lot of users to think it’s broken. It’s not, it’s just different.

My friend Andrea wrote a nice tutorial about how to create a network, and generally when I need help, I scan WPMU Tutorials first. Or I tweet at her. One of the things we’ve talked about is the way WordPress MultiSite changes your blog links.

When I changed https://ipstenu.org from single to multi, my links were changed from https://ipstenu.org/YYYY/MM/PostName to https://ipstenu.org/blog/YYYY/MM/PostName, which I did not want! Thankfully, I knew a lot of people had this problem beforehand and I fixed it quickly, which I will explain here, but first, here’s why it’s done that way.

Normally, when we use pretty permalinks (that’s the part of your URL that looks ‘pretty’ instead of code-like) on a blog, all we have to worry about is not conflicting with post names and page names. If you have an about page, generally the URL is https://ipstenu.org/about. Since WordPress has to translate https://ipstenu.org/?p=2 into that to be pretty, you can’t also have a blog post with the same URL. How would the software know WHICH page you wanted? Simple enough. For details on that, you can read Otto’s post on Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful.

When you add in MultiSite, suddenly the code has to check for something more: is this new Site named something that breaks my existing links?

There are two kinds of MultiSite, and I use them both. You have SubFolders and SubDomains. Subfolders gets you URLs like https://ipstenu.org/code and SubDomains gets you https://halfelf.org/. If you use SubFolders, WordPress takes an extra step to make sure that pages named ‘code’ don’t break when you have a new blog with the same name. To help do that, it kicks your blog URLs from your main blog (i.e. https://ipstenu.org/) up a level to a new URL: https://ipstenu.org/blog/. For those of us who move from Single to Multi, this breaks our old links.

Thankfully there are a couple fixes which can tide you over until WordPress 3.1 is released. The developers plan on having this ‘fixed’ or at least editable by then, so at the worst, you can go from having a blog slug to ‘news’ or ‘pasta’ or whatever.

.htaccess

If you want to keep the blog folder, but you want to redirect your old posts, .htaccess is your friend.

If I wanted to redirect all YYYY/MM/DD posts to /blog/… I would add this:

 
RewriteRule ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ https://ipstenu.org/blog/$1/$2/$3/$4 [L,R=301]

What I actually did on another site was this:

RewriteRule ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ http://domain.com/blog/$4 [L,R=301]

And I changed my permalinks to just post name. This was risky, in a way, but it matches how I use the site better.

Plugins

There are a couple plugins that can help you here. Thinking in WordPress made a plugin for WPMU, but I’ve heard it doesn’t quite work yet.

Andrea (and her husband Ron) have a Remove Blog plugin that can also help you.

I’m sure there are others, but I mostly recommend Andrea and Ron’s. And not just because I like them.

Hack

If you’re dead-set on doing this, and you don’t want to use a plugin, there is a manual way to do this. Remember, by doing this you will BREAK the ability of WordPress to check for conflicts between your main site’s urls and any new site. If you’re using SubDirectory SubDomain MultiSite, this should be fine. Hell, I’m doing it. If you’re using SubFolder, I really don’t recommend this at all.

You ready?

• Login to your admin site.
• Go to: Super Admin > Sites > Edit
• Scroll down to “Permalink Structure” and remove the “/blog” part
• Save

That’s it.