Multisite in subfolder – How to make new sites to be in same level subfolders as the main site

4 comments

1. After these years I hope this will still answer your question…

   I think I’ve got the situation working you want.
   Allthough I don’t have the WordPress installation in ‘/subfolder/’, but I’ve a installation ‘in subdirectory’ per language, and on the same level:

    my-domain.com/nl/ -> this is primary installation, site id = 1 
    my-domain.com/en/ -> this is the first site created by multistie, site id = 2
    my-domain.com/de/ -> this is the second site created by multistie, site id = 3
   

   It requires a bit ‘hacking’ in the database, but it’s very easy.

   Step 1:
   Make sure your multisite ‘root’ installation is working as intended in it’s subdirectory. In my case I got the following in ‘wp-config.php’:

   define('MULTISITE', true);
   define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', false); // allow sub-directory install (true for subdomain install)
   define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'my-domain.com/subfolder');
   define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/wp-multisite-root/');
   define('SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);
   define('BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);
   

   (well in reality I don’t have ‘/subfolder’ 🙂 )

   Step 2:
   Now create you’re first new site through multisite in a subfolder.
   When entering the foldername ‘site2’, WordPress tells you it will be created as:
   my-domain.com/subfolder/wp-multisite-root/site2
   That’s correct, we will remove the ‘wp-multisite-root’ folder manually t

   Step 3:
   Open up phpMyAdmin/directAdmin
   In the table wp_blogs edit the entry of you’re newly created site.
   We will have to modify the path of it.
   It can be done with the following query:

   UPDATE `wp_blogs` SET `path` = '/site2/' WHERE `wp_blogs`.`path` = '/wp-multisite-root/site2/';
   

   Change domain name and site name accordingly.
   Also look for the site id mentioned there. If its the first extra site created it will be ID 2 as in my intro.

   Step 4:
   Look into the table wp_<SITEID>_options.
   In our case with Site ID 2, it will be wp_2_options.
   There we will have to change the option_value where the option_name is ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’. It can be done by running following queries:

   UPDATE `wp_2_options` SET `option_value` = 'my-domain.com/subfolder/site2/' WHERE `option_name` = 'siteurl';
   UPDATE `wp_2_options` SET `option_value` = 'my-domain.com/subfolder/site2/' WHERE `option_name` = 'home';
   

   Again, change the domain and folder name accordingly.
   You’ll note that we remove ‘wp-multisite-root’ from the url there, so site2 will be on the same level as `wp-multisite-root’.

   Step 5:
   Refresh wp-admin and your site(s) will be listed as you wanted.

2. Piemol’s answer is great and worked for me. However, I was unable to log into any of my sites except the main site. Upon inspecting my cookies, I discovered WordPress was making a cookie for only my main site and not the other subdirectories. To use OP’s example, it was making a cookie for /subfolder/wp-multisite-root, which /subfolder/site1 could not use.

   I dug through WordPress core to see what I needed to fix, and I ended up adding this code to my custom plugin to fix the paths used for the cookies:

   define('COOKIEPATH', '/subfolder/');
   define('SITECOOKIEPATH', '/subfolder/');
   

   In my case, my site structure is actually like Piemol’s, so I fixed my cookie paths to be the root:

   define('COOKIEPATH', '/');
   define('SITECOOKIEPATH', '/');
   

3. The simplest solution is to make my-domain/subfolder/ the WordPress install directory and base URL, then enable multisite configured to use subdirectories.

4. I’ve been trying to do a similar thing, and from everything I’ve discovered so far I think the answer is no, this isn’t currently possible 🙁

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