Crankybunny

After numerous attempts to figure out Addon Domains in cPanel - I finally have a working installation of Wordpress for the Crankybunny.com blog. I still have the blog running on TypePad under http://crankybunny.typepad.com, but will change that over as soon as I play around a little bit with the formatting - you know, change the colors, fix the sidebars and figure out the whole georss/maps thing.

What you need to have multiple domains with multiple copies of Wordpress is the following:

1. Create your add on domain
   • If, like me, the domain you registered under was sort of a place holder, then welcome to the mire of weird file structure.
   • You do not need to keep the crappy auto-name that cpanel creates for your folder name. I renamed my wpcrankybunny - as I will have mupliple domains (and multiple wordpress folders)
   • The name “wpcrankybunny” is sort of misleading because it is not just a WordPress folder - it will be ALL of my Crankybunny files: photos, gps tracks, misc.
2. Ignore all the other subdomain crap that get created and focus on your addon domain.
3. The actual location of the addon domain files is in the “public_html” file in your cpanel file structure - this sort of becomes your “root” directory for your addon domain.
4. Create a SQL database on cPanel and note the name and password info
5. Edit your wp_config.php file - add the database info from Step 4.
6. Upload the WordPress folder CONTENTS to your addon domain root folder (…public_html/wpcrankybunny/)
7. To get to the install page for WordPress enter in your browser: http://www.crankybunny.com/wp-install.php NOT http://www.crankybunny.com/wpcrankybunny/wp-install.php.

Repeat for the rest of the WordPress installs you want to set up. At least here - the installs are in different folders. The only thing still bothering me is that WordPress is not contained in it’s own special WordPress folder (MovableType was and I like that).

The directory structure of cPanel and how WordPress uses directories are a little confusing. I don’t like that cPanel is making assumptions about where to go when I type my url in - I can’t figure out how my main domain works and dumped a bogus index.html up to “hide” my directory structure. Nothing but index.html would work which is a little pissy.

And WordPress makes some assumptions too - I can’t put WordPress in a separate folder (…public_html/wpcrankybunny/wp) because then the only way to get to my site would be to type http://www.crankybunny.com/wp. Sucks! Maybe I’m missing something.

If you have multiple domains and are using a web hosting provider that runs off of cPanel I would recommend either getting an account for each domain separately or try a resellers package which will set up a cpanel for each domain separately. The whole concept of hosting multiple domains under one original domain’s file structure sucks and I don’t know why the web hosting community - and specifically cpanel - doesn’t acknowledge this little quirk. I haven’t tried either of these myself as I’m tired of screwing with that particular problem.