WordPress MU

Hey, people

I felt a gap in my knowledge of domain mapping stuff in WPMU and at the same time I need to make a thing that is related to domain mapping - at least I think so ;)

So, I have WPMU 2.6.2 and subdomain installation. In other words, my users have user.domain.com addresses.

Now, I want to give separate domains to some users. Basically, I register a newdomain.com, change DNS records to point to my server, add newdomain.com to control panel.
After it's up and working on my server - I edit web options and set the webdirectory of newdomain.com to domain.com (WPMU) directory.

After that I go to Edit a blog in question and change the following options:

Domain - to newdomain.com
Path - to /

After that I have user.domain.com blog fully working at newdomain.com

So the question is - do I need domain-mapping plugins and stuff to do this? Will having domain mapping plugins/hack improve something I'm not aware of? Or is the way I do everything above OK? :)

I am not sure if this will help you, but from the readme of the domain mapping plugin I am pretty sure yo ucan skip this step:

add newdomain.com to control panel.

meaning users have to point their domains to your WPMU install, and then IF your WPMU install is the first/default vhost, it will catch those domains and redirect them accordingly...

I think the plugin is there to automate the process, meaning you as the admin don't have to do anything, the user redirects, sets up his options in the backend and voila.

feel free to correct me though.

So ANY domain hosted ANYWHERE and having ANY dns records can be 'mapped' to be used by my WPMU?

I gues thats right, check out how these guys are doing it: http://support.cariblogger.com/2008/09/11/get-rid-of-the-cariblogger-in-your-blog-url/

I see :)
Still DNS records have to be changed as I thought earlier. Well, quite a thing - you only have to change NSs ;) Handy

Your users could just point their A records to your server IP and it works automatically.

Some registrars don't give DNS hosting. In that case, they can point their domain to our dns servers. (ns1.wpmusite.com & ns1.wmpmusite.com). For that to work though they'll need to contact us so we can create a dns zone for them on the server.

All works quite good, expect that I haven't been able to fix the image uploader not working on blogs with mapped domains.

:-) sorry I am not very good at explaining things. but glad I could help. the basic issues is that you can skip this step: add newdomain.com to control panel. giving users the power to map domains without you needing to modify anything on your side... the users can take care of everything on their side.

Well, thanks Ovidiu
I was looking for a thing like that. This is good for me because it allows users to manage their emails for example via GoDaddy and still have their domain with blog in my WPMU.

BTW, I was wondering if there exists a plugin to integrate WPMU and Google Apps. I'd love to add the power of Google Apps to those domains mapped to my WPMU.

I like using the domain mapping plugin because it adds a nice management layer and does something else I can't remember off the top of my head.

And yes, you can make it so any domain pointed at your MU install can be picked up with MU.

klark0 - did you edit all the blog URL details? If the top filed has their domain, but the upload files dir has the subdomain, that could quite likely do it.