Migrating static site to multisite with multiple domains and subdomains

Question

ok, here's an overview as this is a bit of a tall order:)

i need to migrate our entire site into wp. right now we're just using wp for a blog page (installed in subfolder w/ subdomain), and all other pages are static in the root of the site.

i want to get all of this combined into one wp install for our main site, blog, and international sites.

here's what i'm doing now -

• test wp multisite installed in subfolder of root
• migrated existing wp posts, plugins, and static pages into multisite (one site for main site, another for uk site)

once i have all content migrated into my multisite install, what is the best way to handle making it live? there are some files and folders with other subdomains pointing to them in the root that exist outside of wp and can't be moved / changed.

I was thinking i would,

• point mysite.com to my test multisite install subfolder and change my site url in wp to mysite.com
• point my uk domain to my test multisite install subfolder and change my site url in wp to mysite.co.uk

is this the best way to go about doing this? also, what would be the best way to keep my top domain pointing to all of my other static content in my root? should I just drop all of those static files into my multisite install folder? can putting those other files in my wp folder mess up my install?

this is a complex job and i'm looking for the best way to do it with minimal headaches (although i kinda have one now after posting this:)!

thanks so much!!!

Answer 1

Moving all content that is just pure text information into Wordpress is step one.
You must choose if you want to create pages or posts for this content.

As a basic rule (for me), the pages generates the navigation structure for my site, and posts are articles. So one page may list several articles.

Then you might have PHP files that generate content by them selves. E.g. retrieveing data from custom DB.

For these pages, you create custom templates. The easiest way is to add the following at the very top of your PHP pages that needs to be kept as theu are:

/*
  Template Name: You custom template name
*/

Then of course add the header, left section, footer etc.

Inside WP just create a page and select the corresponding template.

In this way, you can easy update "static" content by editing pages / posts, and for the custom tempaltes I guess the data needs to be altered in DB or whereever you get the info.

It's the same process for single and multisite.