I have multiple well-established WordPress sites.
I am considering combining them into one WordPress MU site. I have found that a few of the sites probably do not get as much of my attention as they should. I think this may simply be because they are “out of sight, out of mind.” I believe with all sites in one dashboard, they will get much more attention.
Is this the way to go? What is the best method to combine the sites? I haven’t been able to find a tutorial or really too much information.
Manually
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this topic covered by Ipstenu and/or Andrea in Multisite support forum. But this demands a in-depth search in the un-friendly search functionality of WordPress.org.
And if my memory serves me well, I think the solution is to invert the method used to extract a site from Multisite.
This method is described in the 12th chapter of the book WORDPRESS MULTISITE 101, by Mika Epstein (aka Ipstenu).
She has another one that’s quite worth reading as well: WORDPRESS MULTISITE 110, in partnership with Andrea Rennick.
Don’t forget to tip the jar if you find them useful :). Well, they are really useful :)))
Automated
I think there are other plugins that do it as well, but am not sure…
The solution I use is a paid one: BackupBuddy. It allows extracting/injecting sites from/to a Multisite in a breeze.
If you follow this path, my suggestion is to:
Alternative
Use InfiniteWP. It is like ManageWP, but free.
With it you access all your sites dashboards (Single or Multisite sites) in one single interface. And if you excuse a little excess, it is damn cool !
Easiest way is probably going to be the Import/Export tools. Export each individual site into WXR files, then import into your MultiSite install. I’m assuming you’ll also need to set up a MultiSite domain mapping plugin.
See Otto’s article about how to set up the domain mapping (but ignore the remarks about 3.0 compatibility, because the plugin has been updated since the time Otto wrote the article).