For some reason I was having a very hard time getting my domains ready for domain mapping.  We have been getting a new website ready for WordCamp Albuquerque 2011 and for our new Albuquerque WordPress Meetup group.  Some time ago I set up a MultiSite website for K Design and I run my main site, my blog, the wordcamp site, and the meetup site off of it.

Obviously I don’t want people to see wordpress.karenarnolddesign.com when they go to the MeetUp site, so I bought a couple of domains to point to it.  But for some reason I missed the primary domain part of the whole domain mapping thing.    When I pointed albuquerquewp.com to the MeetUp site it was creating a redirect loop.

So, I undid everything and started from scratch.  First I made sure I followed the instructions very carefully laid out on this fabulous tutorial about the domain mapping plugin.

Then, I undid all the settings on the domains I bought, just to be safe.  When I redid the settings, I did this:

Set the nameservers to ns1.mynameserver.com and ns2.mynameserver.com (use your own nameserver here )

In my CPanel and parked each domain on my main domain.

Logged into my MultiSite dashboard and went to Super Admin=> Domains

Added the domains I wanted to associate with my new site, site id (from the site list on Super Admin => Sites),  Domain name, and checked the Primary button for only the one domain I want to show up in the browser address bar.

That’s it!  I think the piece I missed first time around was the parking.  I thought I only had to set the nameserver on the new domains, but I had to park them as well.   The Domain Mapping plugin talks about cnames and that sort of thing, I found a reference on the WordPress Codex that mentioned namesevers working better as IPs can change from time to time.  I have no idea if that is accurate or not, but I am choosing to go with that.