Question

I am setting up a second site using MSM in EE2. I have followed the instructions from EE but I keep getting the following error when I try to access the home page in the 2nd site:

Your system folder path does not appear to be set correctly. Please
open the following file and correct this: index.php

The second site is set as sub-domain as follows:

main site: http://174.121.46.122/~flowerwo/

sub-domain: http://174.121.46.122/~plants/

I have tried a server path and a url with no success:

$system_path = ‘/home/domain/public_html/system/’;

I could use some help on this. Thanks!

Answer 1

ExpressionEngine’s MSM (Multiple Site Manager) works best using virtual domains or subdomains served off the same server.

The value for your $system_path variable will depend where on how you have the second domain’s files relative to the first domain.

For example, if your directory structure looked like this:

└── domain1.com
    ├── admin.php
    ├── index.php
    ├── images
    ├── system
    └── themes
└── domain2.com
    ├── admin.php
    └── index.php

Then you could set your $system_path variable for domain2.com as:

$system_path = '../domain1.com/system/';

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Your setup is slightly different, since you appear to be using Apache’s UserDir Module for your domains instead of VirtualHost Directives.

I don’t have any experience with this rather odd setup, but you may just need to adjust a few settings in your second domain’s admin.php and index.php files:

$system_path = '../flowerwo/system/';
$assign_to_config['site_name'] = 'plants';
$assign_to_config['site_url']  = 'http://174.121.46.122/~plants/';
$assign_to_config['cp_url'] = 'http://174.121.46.122/~plants/admin.php';

The value can either be relative or absolute from your ExpressionEngine system folder, though some servers may require a full, absolute path.

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If you want a bulletproof way of determining the server path for each of your MSM domains, upload a simple PHP file named phpinfo.php into the root of each domain:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Load the page in your browser and look for the following variable:

_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"]

The value of that variable will be the full path to your PHP Info script:

/home/domain/public_html/phpinfo.php

Remove the phpinfo.php part, add in the name of your system folder, system, and that will be the path to your MSM domain:

/home/domain/public_html/system

If ExpressionEngine still has problems, you might want to see if your server has any PHP open_basedir or PHP SafeMode restrictions in place (these settings will be determined by your web host).