Ron and Andrea are legendary, with good cause. Great people making great contributions to WP and the web in general.

I would recommend the Networks+ plugin too as you'll be given premium support by Ron and Andrea.

Have you taken a look at Networks+ ?

http://wpebooks.com/networks/

I *think* this will do what you're asking.

You're wanting to serve the same data on the same domain to folks, but have it come from a server which is location-specific based on where they signed up from. Is that correct?

Not exactly. They would be separate servers, each with their own content. For example, you could choose to set up your blog on the New York server. Your blog would be on that server only.

Our goal is simpler than it sounds. We just want to have multiple multisite networks in different locations to give people a choice. But, for cosmetic reasons, we would like all of them to be under the same domain "umbrella". Otherwise we would have to come up with a domain for each location.

We could do things like:

ourdomainnewyork.com
ourdomainsanjose.com

But we don't want to make the domains longer like that. I mean, your website would be much better as:

username.ourdomain.com

...as opposed to username.ourdomainsanfrancisco.com

Of we could do newyork.ourdomain.com and sanjose.ourdomain.com, but that would have the same drawbacks. And I don't even know if that would work on multisite. I mean would your site be username.newyork.ourdomain.com? That's too convoluted.

So we just want to keep the domain nomenclature clean and simple for our users while giving people a choice of locations.

It may not be possible...but, if it is, I'd love to know how.

Thanks,

Mark

Yeah, they are separate installs, but all under the 'umbrella' of a main network.

I'm kinda stumped on this one. You're wanting to serve the same data on the same domain to folks, but have it come from a server which is location-specific based on where they signed up from. Is that correct?

Mason, do those plugins actually manage separate networks in different locations, or do they create virtual networks running on the same multisite install?

users would sign up at locations like newyork.domain.com, california.domain.com, etc.

That would be okay (but not ideal)...however, if each network has a subdomain in at the main level (like newyork.domain.com), how are the sub-sites named? Is it subdomain.newyork.domain.com?

Thanks,

Mark

I guess I need to understand a bit more about what you're wanting to accomplish.

You want users from a specific region to sign up on a particular installation - but have both of these exist at the same domain? Thus, having two installs on the same domain?

That's not what these plugins do. They'd allow for different installations, but users would sign up at locations like newyork.domain.com, california.domain.com, etc. The user database would be shared so you couldn't have more than one of the same username.

It sounds like you may be thinking more of some kind of ip delivery system (like how google decides to give you a different search page based on your origin country). I know there are hosting providers that help with this:
http://www.technogenics.com/geotarget-web-host.html

But haven't personally looked into it.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Can you clarify...I am not sure that these will do what we need, as I think they both intend for each network to have its own domain. Our goal, on the other hand, is to share the same domain among multiple networks, and then somehow manage the creation of accounts between them.

So, for example, if our main domain is main.com and we have an LA and New York server (each running a multisite network), the user could choose whether to sign up on the LA or New York server. An account would be set up under the main domain (e.g., username.main.com), no matter which server you choose.

In summary, our goal is to distribute our network geographically and also keep it as separate networks so as not to put all our eggs in one basket. But we'd like to minimize the need to manage a different TLD for each location (especially if we end up with many).

Will those plugins accomplish this? Or is this virtually impossible?

Thanks,

Mark

Like a multi-network plugin?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/networks-for-wordpress/

or this one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-multi-network/
although, you'll need to use the latest version on SVN for it to work (as it hasn't had an official release yet):
http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-multi-network/trunk/

I think either of these will accomplish what you're looking for.

Is there any way to have multiple multisite networks operate under the same domain? Say we have a server/network in Los Angeles, and another in New York. And we want users to pick which server they sign up under. But we'd like them both to be under domain.com, so a site created on either one would be subdomain.domain.com. Of course we'd need a way to manage the hosts in our DNS records, and a way to synchronize the usernames so the same subdomain/username couldn't be used on both.

Is there any (reasonably easy) way to do this?