You remember we had a topic Migrate (Convert) WordPress into Multisite installation. Someone asked how to do that manually with subdomains, which were created with single
WP installations. Well, with very quick answer, what I remember, you need to follow very accurate steps to achieve that:
- At first, create backups of databases for 3 of those sites.
- Subdomains! this in necessary step (leaving this step, will make you to fail): do you use VPS where you can have a wildcard subdomains? If so, then you can delete the manually created
sub1
andsub2
(so, as all subdomains should be autoamtically mapped to main domain). If you use shared-hosting, then you MUST ask to support if your package nativelly support WP multisites with **subdomains** (really, you should ask that) and they will tell you what needs to be changed on your hosting configuration. In worst scenario, you might be still able to create subdomains manually from your hosting. - Now, setup WP Multisite with
subdomains
option, and fromNetwork
panel, createsub1
and so on… - Determine the
ID
s of thesub1
site. (let’s say, it’s2
). Then go tophpMyAdmin
of MS site, and inwp2_posts
, delete the dummy entries, and import the table fromsub1
wp_posts
. do same forwp_postmeta, wp_term* (all of those 4 tables), wp_comments, wp_commentsmeta, and wp_options (but not wp_users, wp_usermeta
) . (DO THE SAME forsub2
). - I suggest that you manually re-created the users in new MS site. Otherwise, you have to manually combine both
wp_users
andwp_usermeta
tables into MS site’swp_users
andwp_usermeta
, or use user-migration (export) plugin to migrate users from subdomain to new MS site.
Probably I’ve missed some important points too, but let me know in comments…