SelfHosting week2, phase 1.
Setup: Hostinger provider, KVM2 VPS plan. 2 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB storage, Debian 12, YunoHost 12.1.39 stable, WordPress 6.9 branch.
WordPress procedure, I assumed it had to be the easiest, where I am mostly skilled in; obviously, it wasn't.
First of all, because YunoHost installs a plugin called "Companion auto update" which gives an error just on admin page. F-off to it. In that case I deactivated it through terminal, but I found the error's origin thanks to an LLM which interpreted the log for me. If I were unexperienced with web sites advanced configurations, I couldn't have figured it out.
My current multilingual approach on production website, has been a very satisfying experience but I'm noticing it requires too much attention in long term; full-site editing (gutenberg), manual template switch for each English or Italian post, some custom code to manage search and taxonomies. But any deep maintenance could break everything.
So I decided to follow an advice from @2ndkauboy a German blogger who wrote about MultiLingualPress, plug-in connected to MultiSite WordPress platforms during Advent period in his "Plugin Advent Calendar".
Having a VPS now I assumed to be 100% free to perform Multisite and began to build it: YunoHost's WordPress installer asked me if I wanted MultiSite or not, I confirmed YES.
The first obstacle was it did not work as I desired: my idea was to get "domain.extension/" as main site while "domain.extension/english" as second language website but YunoHost refused to place WordPress into the main directory, namely subdomain.domain.extension/, with multisite setup on.
So I removed WordPress from @yunohost by command: "sudo yunohost app remove wordpress"
Re-installed through the same script, sudo yunohost app install wordpress, this time answering "NO" to multisite option, and it accepted to provide the / directory as location.
Enabled MultiSite manually by editing wp-config.php file and installing it, then added extra-lines in the wp-config as well, after the network creation, using subdirectories for multisite setup. YunoHost uses nginx, so I went to modify the subdomain's WordPress nginx configuration; in that case as well, LLM helped me.
But then came trouble: I was logged off WordPress admin. No way to recover the password, no way to access its dashboard.
So, I gave up.
Tried another day: remove, re-install, set MultiSite manually. This time I used another e-mail address and when I got stuck, I managed to reset its password. But after setting main and secondary web sites, the result was wp-admin on main site worked, while /english/wp-admin returned an error: "ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS".
No way to make it work at all!
So, I resigned. Removed, re-installed with multi-site on natively, by setting the path to subdomain.domain.ext/wp/
having /wp/ and /wp/english/ seemed to be the less evil.
In the end the too_many_redirects error was still there, and disappeared only when I added this string:
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
into the nginx WordPress-specific configuration, under the "location" setting.
Not bad, I assumed it was OK.
But installing MultilingualPress, the plugin suggested by the German blogger of before, wp-admin returned a critical error. Maybe a database, or something else.
Increased the php memory to 256M in wp-config.php and the multilingual press then resulted as active, in the network setup.
So I tried to connect the two blogs, setting related languages and trying to flag relations one another.
But nothing worked. The relations weren't flagged, and going to network / plugins, returned an error again.
So, in the end, I've resigned at the moment, to create two subdomains. English and Italian. Where I have two separate WordPress installations.
I'd like to try again the Multisite experience, though.
#accessibility #a11y #debian #multilingual #multisite #SelfHost #SelfHosting #WordPress #Yunohost
