WordPress MU

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to post the solutions I've discovered on a couple of issues that seem to be fairly common when installing WPMU locally.

Just so's you know, I'm running Windows XP SP3 with xampplite 1.6.6 with just Apache and MySQL running.

I did spend a couple of days scatching my head, trawling the forums, scratching my head s'more and trawling blogs, and this is what I came up with to get everything up, running and working.

First: READ THE README FILE. Even if you only read as far as line 30. Lines 21 - 25 are particularly helpful, and refer to the file httpd.conf which should be located in C:\xampplite\apache\conf or similar:

2. In the <Directory> directive of your virtual host, look for this line
"AllowOverride None"
and change it to
"AllowOverride FileInfo Options"

First off, as you might notice, WPMU doesn't want to run on http://localhost - it wants a domain extension to run with.

Go to c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\ and edit the file hosts with something like Wordpad or Notepad. You should find one of the first lines looks something like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost

Simply append 'local.domain' or whatever domain extension you'd like to the end of this line, thus:

127.0.0.1 localhost local.domain

After restarting Apache and going back to your WPMU install, using this address:

http://local.domain/MyWPMUsite/

...assuming that's where you unzipped your files. You should then be able to start a successful installation...

...and then you might start getting 'Internal Error 500' thrown up for practically anything you try to do.

I screwed around with trying to CHMOD local files, etc. But in the end, I just needed to edit one line in the httpd.conf file; search for the following line:

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

...and simply uncomment it by removing the hash (#) at the start. You will need to stop then restart Apache, but you *should* find everything working just luverly! I found that last trick here

Hopefully that's helpful to some people suffering with the same localhost installation issues that plagued me for a few hours.

but can you access it from other wan-side machines?

I haven't tried at all - this was only a local installation on a single machine. I'd guess that entirely depends on your WAN setup. I only figured this out a couple of hours ago!

Some observations while getting MU running locally on XP SP2 with Apache server (2.2.9 win32), MySql (5.0), and PHP (5.2.6).
1) When modifying the hosts file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), after several attempts, this (suggested above) did not work for me:
127.0.0.1 localhost local.domain
But this did:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
So when filling out the Wordpress setup fields, I entered "localhost.localdomain" into the Server Address field.
Since my wordpress files are in htdocs/wordpress, this is my local wordpress url: http://localhost.localdomain/wordpress/
2) The wordpress README.txt instructions said to look for a <Directory> directive and change:
"AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride FileInfo Options"
There were three <Directory directives in my httpd.conf file, only the first one needed the change.
3) The wordpress README.txt instructions also say to update the <VirtualHost> section
I didn't find such a section in my httpd.conf file so I didn't do this step.
4) and while in httpd.conf, a friend recommended updating <IfModule dir_module> to include index.php
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
</IfModule>
Hope that helps.

Hope these post also helps :

http://www.hostingformula.info/step-by-step-install-wordpress-multi-user-in-localhost-adding-host/

http://www.hostingformula.info/step-by-step-install-wordpress-multi-user-in-localhost-make-permalink-work/

Thanks a bunch... worked like a charm! :)

Muchas gracias, thanks, thanks, thank you :D

Fantastic. Works a treat

I spoke too soon.

When I add new blogs, it says it can't find them: such as http://tm.local.domain/mu/

"Server not found" - any ideas?

Ok, sorted (for now anyway :P ) edited the host file to include:

127.0.0.1 localhost local.domain
127.0.0.1 test1.local.domain
127.0.0.1 test2.local.domain

I got an easier way for that
read this
http://www.posteonline.co.cc/2009/07/09/how-to-install-wordpress-mu-in-windows-localhost-using-xampp/

I have recently gotten multiple Wordpress MU installations using subdomains setup on my local Windows machine with XAMPP, and I wrote quite a lengthy post of the process that I learned along the way... Hope it helps anyone who cares.

http://mainewebguy.com/2009/getting-wordpress-mu-to-work-with-subdomains-on-local-windows-machine/

Thanks!