How To Change the URL of a WordPress Multisite

Question

I'm attempting to pull down and set up a live Multisite in my local dev environment to perform theme updates and fixes before reuploading and publishing the changes.

The main site works fine using SRDB, updating .htaccess with WordPress provided settings and manually changing the domains and paths in the database tables;

wp-blogs
wp-site
wp-x-options (for each multisite where x is the numerical id)
- home
- siteurl
- fileupload_url

But the resources for the multisite can not be resolved.

E.g.

• Main Site: /example.com.au/
• Microsite: /example.com.au/franchise/name
• Requested file: /example.com/franchise/name/wp-content/plugins/contact-form--
• 7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=4.3
• Actual file location: /example.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=4.3

I believe this is because of the modification of the multisite URLs and virtual nesting in the 'franchise' subdirectory, preventing the .htaccess rules from being able to resolve the requested file to the actual file. But I'm also at a loss for as to why it works on the current website.
I have seen references in the wp-config.php to sunrise.php which I believe is a part of the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin, which I suspect could enable the extra subdirectory to work, but I'm really pulling at straws here.

Any insight into the way Multisites map their requests would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

These are the .htacess rules that fixed it.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
#RewriteRule  ^(.+)?/(wp-.*) /$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/(wp-.*) /$2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]