I’ve been playing around with wp_hive plugin for a while a day or two now and I wanted to see how I can import my other blogs into it. The reason is that I want to have a central point where I can manage all the blogs instead of having to update and upgrade at different places all the time. My other blogs that I wanted to import run on wordpress but they were an older version though. I had a look at the number of tables and they were 10 while the new wordpress 2.9.1 had 11. So the first thing that I did was to update wordpress on the other blogs. If your blogs run on some other platform, then you will need to get it into wordpress format before you can import the blogs to use with WP Hive.
Once you’ve installed wordpress on your primary domain eg DomainA.com (the place where you want central management), you just need to copy the wp_hive plugin contents into the plugins folder in wordpress. Next make sure the wp_content is writable otherwise you wouldn’t be able to activate the plugin. Once that is done, you can start adding other domains into WP Hive. You do that by inputting the new domain name eg DomainB.com and then put “/” as the subfolder because you want it to point to the main installation directory which in this case is DomainA.com. Use a unique table prefix for this new domain eg dmb_ as all the tables for the hives will be created in the same database and the table names are important to load the files specific to a particular domain.
The above paragraph is really for adding new domains (blogs) but for existing blogs you will need to export a copy of the database (through PHPMyAdmin) and find and replace table names (wp_) with another prefix. You do that only for table names – it takes about 1 min and all you have to do is make sure that you’re replacing the prefix only for create and insert statements and not actual input values. Once this is done, you go back to the main domain to import this database (for your existing blog) in your main database (the main database you’ll be using for wp hive). You then proceed to add a new site by going to the options in wp hive on your main wordpress installation. You will need at this point to add the domain name as a parked domain. Don’t try to make it an addon domain! Just park the domain on top of your main one. If you have the default theme, everything should work fine now.
However if you have another theme, you will see a blank page at this point because wordpress is not able to load the theme specified in the wp_options table. You just need to copy the theme from your previous blog into your main one and voila, everything is back!
Remember that DNS propagation takes time and sometimes you will get DNS errors or 404s because nameservers changes haven’t completed. Just be patient!