WordPress MU

While I'm quite capable of hacking the core to death, I'm wondering if this might be better suited for an install option instead.

When installing, it seems many people are using a subdomain for their primary install, but they would like to have the usernames be on the same level of subdomain as the primary. Mainly for incorporating into existing sites I suppose.

So, I'm wondering if it would be possible to allow an option in the install for the following:

1) specify the domain to be used overall (example.tld)

2) specify the primary MU site (primary.example.tld)

Then, during sign-up, a new blog is created as username.example.tld, instead of username.primary.example.tld as it is now.

What brought this up, and lead to a thorough search for me here, was I'm working on taking an existing site that's coming close to 5 years of age, and implementing MU as an added feature. While the main action of the original site is primarily a forum, I'd hate to have it all re-indexed by switching that to a sub-domain, to free up the main domain.

Not to mention the headache of all the redirects since MU will be on it's own separate box(es).

It looks from the set-up that it's already somewhat possible, but I'm still playing around with (and breaking) it.

It looks like all it needs to do is treat blog_id 1 as the primary, while pulling the domain from the _site table.

The "best" success I've had so far with this is changing the value in the _site table, which "does" partially work.

Only some of the links are broken, like wp-login, wp-signup, etc. Those could be hardcoded into the theme though as needed.

Has anyone found any workarounds to this perhaps? Preferably without major hacks to the corefiles?

If not, is it something that has been considered for future versions?

Something that wp-signup could reference, and in turn wpmu-functions could use for sign-up as well?

As a note to Donncha, I'd be happy to help with moving it forward and "earning my keep" so to speak.

Could we consider generalizing the entire URL rewriting scheme?

In addition to

blog1.primarydomain.tld

we support

blog1.arbitarydomain.tld

This would simplify (for me) wordpress updates for multiple domains that I host. It looks like the url rewriting needs to replace the content of

table/column
wp_site/domain

with

wp_blogs/domain

Perhaps.

I know right now I've simply modified wp-signup and a couple tweaks to one or two functions in wpmu-functions.php just so that i could run my primary on a subdomain and not have 4th level user blogs.

On top of being able to simply specify the primary site domain and the domain to use for creating blogs during sign-up, it wouldn't be to difficult to add a new tab under site admin to control all domains. This way, someone could easily add a domain to their "network", and then additional users could register for that domain or the primary.

I mean, the table is already there, and the functionality to use multiple domains, it just needs a little touch-up to put it fully into action.

So I'm not sure if this is on the roadmap or not (ok, I should go look), but it seems like it was either thought of, and not fully put together, or it's there for advanced users to hack with and test, and at some point it will be fully included as a feature.

I can't tell you how grateful I would be for help with this, either as a feature or a hack. I really need this. Can any of you guys help me?