I spent the day crawling thru a half dozen articles on utlizing the domain mapping features of wordpress mu. After some angst filled hours, I finally mapped a domain to my Mu site Real Sports Bloggers. For added difficulty, I still use my hostmonster shared account to handle most of my domains. I am running my Mu from a futurehosting VPS - but I never transfered the domain.

To correct this, I simply pointed the nameservers and manual moved the entire site. Today, rather than transfer the ‘discussionati.com ‘, I changed those name servers to point to my Mu. Then I parked the domain on my Mu. I made some changed in the DB and everything resolved beautifully.

I’m not entirely sure why I even needed the multi-site plugin. It certainly didn’t help me when I needed it… i.e. editing the DB. I used this tutorial. Check that link for the entire tutorial. I’ll repost the meat, though.

The cool thing is that, because many plugins don’t check for site id, I can still use most of my fave plugins and get the results I want. YAY!

1. There are four places we need to make changes at. Under URL, you will see http://abunchofcars.bui4ever.com/, change that to http://abunchofcars.com/. Look for Siteurl, Home, and Fileupload Url and make the same changes as you did with Url, but leaving the suffix of “files” at the end of the Fileupload Url. Please note that it is very important that if the address has a trailing slash, you also include the trailing slash.
   
   
2. Click “Update Options”, once it’s done, you’ll be returned to “Blogs” and notice that the newly created blog no longer is in the list.
3. Before we can access the newly created blog, we need to make some changes in the MySQL database. Login to your CPANEL and PHPMYADMIN (I highly recommend you get the PHPMyAdmin plugin so you don’t have to always login to CPANEL to access PHPMYADMIN).
4. Select the correct database from the drop down under “Database”.
5. On the left hand side, scroll down until you see “wp_blogs”. Click on it and it should open in the right hand side. Click on “Browse” in the menu.
   
6. Scroll down and you will see a list of all the blogs that have been registered. At the very end of the list, you should see abunchofcars.com under “Domain”. Click the pencil icon to edit that entry.
7. Once it finishes loading, we want to change “site_id”’s value to be the same as “blog_id”. For me, abunchofcars.com’s blog_id is 25, so I change site_id 1 to 25, and click “Go”. What this does is remove bui4ever.com (site_id 1) as the “blog owner” and make abunchofcars.com its own blog owner. Also you should remember the blog_id, as you will need it for the next few steps.
   
   
8. On the left hand side, scroll down until you see “wp_site”. Click on it and it should open in the right hand side. Click on “Browse” in the menu.
   
9. You should see one entry for your main blog. What we need to do is add an entry for abunchofcars.com. Click on “Insert” and we need to populate three values.
   
10. For “id”, we enter the blog_id, in my case, 25. For “domain”, we enter the domain address, so I enter abunchofcars.com. And finally for path, we just put a forward slash (/). Click “Go”.
    
11. So when you go back to wp_site and click “Browser”, you see your new entry.
12. On the left hand side, scroll down until you see “wp_sitemeta”. Click on it and it should open in the right hand side. Click on “Browse” in the menu.
13. We need to duplicate the contents of “meta_id” 6, the site_admins. Click on the pencil to edit it.
    
14. In the “meta_value” field, you will see a big box with an entry:

    a:1:{i:0;s:5:"admin";}

    Copy in its entirety.

15. Click back on wp_sitemeta, and select “Browse”. Go to the very last entry, and make note of the “meta_id” number. Now click “Insert”.
16. We need to make entries now, under “meta_id”, enter the next consecutive from the number you made note of in Step 27. In my case, the last entry was 64, so I will be using 65. The “site_id” you use is from Step 19, so I will enter 25. The “meta_key” is site_admins. In the big field under “meta_value”, paste the weird string we copied in Step 26. Click “Go”.
    
17. We need to duplicate another entry, click wp_sitemeta and “Insert”. For “meta_id”, we need to use the next consecutive number. Under “site_id”, we use the same number from Step 19. For “meta_key”, enter site_name. In “meta_value”, enter in your parked domain address. In my case, I would enter abunchofcars.com. Click “Go”.
    
18. The final entry that needs to be duplicated is “illegal_names”. So go back to wp_sitemeta, and click “Insert”. For “meta_id”, it needs to be the next consecutive number from what was used in Step 29. For “site_id”, enter the site_id from Step 19. The “meta_key” is illegal_names and the “meta_value” entry is

    a:7:{i:0;s:3:"www";i:1;s:3:"web";i:2;s:4:"root";i:3;s:5:"admin";i:4;s:4:"main";i:5;s:6:"invite";i:6;s:13:"administrator";}

19. Now we should be good to go for testing. Open a web browser and enter in your parked domain address, I enter http://abunchofcars.com and you should see a newly created WordPress blog. If you don’t, a mistake was made somewhere.
20. The next step is test login. Try your admin login and you should get in fine. Please note, if you type http://abunchofcars.com/wp-admin it will redirect you to your main site’s site admin. It is very important that you include a trailing slash after wp-admin, so http://abunchofcars.com/wp-admin/. Hopefully this issue will be resolved in the near future.
21. Now another cool feature of the domain mapping, is that you can also create subdomain blogs off of the newly mapped domain. I can create http://how-to.abunchofcars.com and users can also sign up for their own blogs as they do on the main site. Cool huh?