I attempted to install the multi-user version of WordPress in this domain today. You can see it at http://blogs.terrywassall.org. As you can see, rather than install in a directory, for instance terrywassall.org/blogs, I created a subdomain for the installation. All seemed to go well until I activated the option allowing visitors to register their own blog to see how and if this worked. It didn’t. I tried to register a blog with the user name ‘test’. This should have created a blog at test.blog.terrywassall.org. The email was delivered confiming the creation of the blog with a link to activate the blog. However, on doing so I get a ‘not found’ error message.

Two possibilites occur. One is that it looks as if WPMU is trying to create a subdomain in a subdomain. I didn’t realise this is how it would work and I chose the ‘subdomain’ option when installing as I thought this referred to the installation’s location, i.e. in a subdomain. It now seems this option tells WPMU to create a new subdomain for each blog. Perhaps this will only work if I install WPMU in the root – httpdocs in this case. This is probably the problem. The other information I have found is that if I want to use the subdomain option for blogs I need to add a wildcard record to my DNS records (whatever that means). I found this information in chapter 12, page 258, of WordPress for Dummies which I can heartly recommend. I need to add a hostname record pointing at my web server using  a DNS configuration tool. I don’t think I have access to one of these. Looks like I will have to email my ISP for help.

The alternative would be to do the installation in a directory or to dedicate a domain to it by installing in root rather than in a subdomain or a subdirectory.