Is there is a way to group a large number of WordPress Multisites For Easier Organisation?

Question

I did some extensive Google searching before this and I have come up empty-handed, so I am hoping someone has a better idea of what my options are here. I am planning on using WordPress for an ambitious client project. Needless to say, I will be operating a few thousand independent sites in a single WordPress Multisite installation, and these sites will be region-specific.

For example, I will have a New York site, but then sites that would live under that umbrella such as Mohawk Valley, Capital District and so on. Now, when the number of sites is low, creating them and scrolling down the list of sites is not a problem, but I know it's going to be a logistical nightmare from a UI and categorisation perspective to find a site.

Ideally, I would like to change the sites screen from its masonry grid-like layout to something that is grouped.

• New York

  • Mowhawk Valley
  • Capital District
  • Long Island

• California

  • San Francisco Bay Area
  • Sierra Nevada
  • Los Angeles
  • Malibu

You get the idea. At present, I can create these sites, but they are all shown together, which is even more of a problem when you get duplicate region names in different areas. For example, Australia has a city called Brisbane, and there is also a Brisbane in San Francisco.

Answer 1

One way to do this is using multiple networks. A network is a group of multisites, a new level in the hierarchy.

There is by default no interface for that, you have to use a plugin. My recommendation is WP Multi Network by John James Jacoby, the developer who brought this feature to the WordPress core. The instructions are on the plugin page, and there's a more elaborate article on wpmudev.

For a list of sites, you have to run a custom database query on the table blogs. I guess there is already something like that in the plugin code that you can use.

However that doesn't deal with multiple levels, like Country/State/District, so you have to indicate the hierarchy by URLs and use that in your custom listing function, or you write a completely new database table to handle the hierarchies.