ZinkDifferent After nearly a year of working on this, here is my conclusion (see Better Method below):
The Problem
I have used WP MultiSite Domain since it was a release candidate. And the MultiNetwork Plugin since David Dean first published it. I was convinced of its value.
I was, with manual tweaking, able to make this work in WordOps under HTTP. Both with and without YOURLS. If anyone would like to know how I did it, I would be willing to publish what I did. However, I was NOT able to get Let's Encrypt and HTTPS to function at a production level on all sites and with multiple packages sharing a single site with the Multi-Network Plugin. Lately, I have been thinking about MY end-of-life cycle and making things easier to understand for those I leave behind (37 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and hacking code for 50+ years!). Plus, I have decided to publish health information on how to heal heart disease and diabetes with lifestyle changes (stop eating known poisons in some common foods!) I decided to look for a simpler way. Here is my conclusion to this thread.
Why Multi-Networks?
Long ago, I looked at MultiSite/Multi-Network as a way to save storage (hard drive space). Back in the day, 50-100MB was a normal hosting and having an account with 1-3Gig was not so common. saving 5-30MB using MultiSite/Multi-Network was practical. However, today 50-100 extra MBs is really nothing. WordOps with one site per domain base name is a better choice than Multi-Networks.
Better Method
I now believe using a WordOps site per Domain Name (instead of the WP Multi-Networks Plugin) is a much better option for these reasons:
- One WO site per domain is a better option than Multi-Network. This puts each domain in its own WordOps container and uses standard WO automatic configuration.
- For anyone needing MultiSite Domain or MultiSite Directory, these are available via easy WO commands.
- Let's Encrypt and HTTPS can be added to any site via easy WO command.
- Because each site has its own container, it makes it easier to manually add features. I have a plan to build, on a single domain, a WordPress, YOURLS (I'm this far already) and add a forum like SMF or phpBB.
- This makes it easy to manually build stand-alone sites like YOURLS, SMF, or even a custom site using PHP and a database.
For these reasons, when I build my new WordPress/WordOps guides for my network, I will not be recommending using the Multi-Network Plugin in WordOps or Nginx (Nonetheless, it is still the best option for Apache servers).