Help me make domain name A appear at subdomain B.

December 1, 2012 6:17 PM

WordpressFilter: Domain A is pointed at Domain B, specifically at Subdomain http://example.domainB.com. How do I make it appear as if the site on Domain B is actually being hosted at domain A, URL-wise?

Possibly simple Wordpress question that I can't figure out because my usual tech-support person is in Argentina:

I have a client Wordpress site. It is hosted at a subdomain of my personal website. Let's call this "http://client.mydomain.com". The client's domain name—"http://www.clientdomain.com"—is pointing to my subdomain, using a static IP on my end. (The domain is configured this way due to Microsoft Exchange stuff that I frankly don't understand. Changing the nameservers wasn't an option, so says client's IT company.)

So. The URL "http://www.clientdomain.com" is displaying properly on the home page of the client's website, but the URL on every other page continues to show the site where it's hosted—aka http://client.mydomain.com.

I'm aware that I need to change something within phpmyadmin and also something in Wordpress (probably the config.php file?).

I'm annoyed that I can't figure this out on my own, but trying to do a Google search for this has been completely unhelpful. I have a feeling I may end up smacking my forehead in disgust that I haven't figured this out.

Thanks, MeFites. You're both helpful and brilliant.

posted by seesaw to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: Within WordPress, ensure that both the site URL and location url are your client's domain under general settings. That should be all that is necessary if their domain is parked on yours.
posted by maxwelton at 6:31 PM on December 1, 2012

Wordpress also has an irritating habit of stuffing absolute links into the content, so you may need to scrub the database: mysqldump and sed 's/client.mydomain.com/www.clientdomain.com/g' are your friends. In fact, that should cover all the dynamic settings too, and then you just go into wp-config.php to set the hostname.

This is all from memory, BTW, and it's been a while since I did this, but I used to have to do something like this fairly often when users on a WPMU / WordPress network wanted site name changes.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:46 PM on December 1, 2012

Monsieur is correct, and there are plugins available to do the scrubbing for you...but be careful, the ones I've used aren't very sophisticated and sinply look for text matches and do a swap. Just be very careful what you put into the search and replace boxes.
posted by maxwelton at 9:40 PM on December 1, 2012

My hosting company offers a chance to redirect sites like this, called "domain redirecting." If you do a "view source" when this is active, it shows only the redirect code. The only problem is that only the "front door" URL remains visible in the address bar wherever you go in the destination site. The subpage URLs do not display.
posted by yclipse at 3:49 AM on December 2, 2012

It sounds like you're after this information: Changing the Site URL, but I don't think it's going to help you out because of the way you're pointing the domain. You need to change things at the DNS level too.

Someone who knows what they're doing shouldn't have any issue with pointing things to Exchange and to your web host.
posted by backwards guitar at 4:40 AM on December 2, 2012

Best answer: OP here.

It was in fact a forehead-slapping moment. All I did was go into Settings > General and changed the Site Address (not the WordPress Address—I've done this before only to incur horrible mysequel problems).

Thank you for your help! You steered me in the right direction.
posted by seesaw at 10:23 AM on December 3, 2012