September 10, 2009 As you can imagine, we’re huge fans of Donncha’s work and think his domain mapping plugin was the bees when it came out.
But we also heard that you guys could do with a fully functional domain mapping plugin, that covers every element of mapping that you’d like it to, and ticks all the boxes that we can think of.
For example, you wanted a domain mapping plugin that:
- Auto-detects whether your site is a sub-domain or sub-directory install and works just fine for both.
- Comes with built in cross domain cookie syncing, so your users will stay logged in (or out) regardless of whether they are on your standard domain or their custom one.
- Allows users to, if you want, map multiple domains to the one blog (yes, that means that your blog can now live at myblogname.com and myotherblogname.com simultaneously!
- Was actively developed and supported 24/7/365
So, we went and made it for you, yes we did, and you can find the ultimate domain mapping plugin for WordPress MU right here.
But we didn’t stop there either…
One of the main requirements that we’ve found people to be after was to allow domain mapping only to paying / upgraded users of your site.
In essence, to allow only peopel who have paid to map their domains to you.
So we did just that and integrated domain mapping with our comprehensive Supporter plugin.
As a result, once your have Supporter installed, you can decide through a simple site admin > options setting whether you want to…
“Make this functionality only available to Supporters” – Yes / No
Not bad huh!
And, as one last treat… we’ve also made this able to operate as a drop in replacement for Donncha’s original plugin, so y don’t need to chnage anything… just drop this in and enjoy the domain goodness.
To get started just drop the download into /mu-plugins/ and pop in the IP address of your server into the options area at the bottom of site admin > options (if you don’t know the IP address of your server just ask your tech support people)
Once that’s done, if you have Supporter installed make sure that domain mapping is enabled appropriately, and tell eligible users they can set their domains at ‘Tools > Domain Mapping’.
And you can enable allowing multiple domains to be mapped to one blog, if you wish, at line 29 in the plugin code.
Enjoy and you can download domain mapping for wpmu here.
James Farmer on Google+
Hi James,
Thanks for releasing this, seems very promising all the features we always wished we had but are lacking from Donncha’s (still awesome plugin).
-scott
I would think it would be much better to tell users to CNAME their new domain name to the default hostname… I.e. if they were blogging at example.bloggingservice.com and they went and bought example.com, tell them to CNAME http://www.example.com to example.bloggingservice.com …
Then you can use multiple web servers or even move your site from one server to another without having to go back and tell your ALL your users to redo their DNS settings…
To be honest I’d prefer nameservers :)
I know what you mean re: CNAME, but A records seem a lot moe accessible to most people… would be interested in alternative opinions on that though.
From the plugin’s perspective it doesn’t matter really how the end user does his DNS, this is all just to give some explanatory text to the user, right?
It’s just a preference of the blog service provider if they want to tell their users to use A records or CNAMEs… So why not make some preference in the plugin for the blog service provider
[ ] Suggest CNAMEs to alias hosts to hosts
[ ] Suggest A records to point hosts to IP addresses
Don’t know how hard that would be but it would be nice… ;-)