How to replicate Wordpress multisite subdomain structure in Netlify

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Apologies for being so slow to get back to you!

Reason for the delay is that we’ve talked about this extensively and the question is pretty broad - we can’t talk you through exactly how to do it; we can only tell you what is possible and suggest some tools you could use. At a high level, the tools would be Netlify / your SSG / your headless CMS - so we’ll leave you to choose a CMS and SSG, and just advise on Netlify. Good news: this pattern is in frequent use across our customer base today :slight_smile:

Specific followups to your points:

  1. You should be able to (but do not have to) host the CMS + the gatsby part of the site in a single netlify site.

  2. As you seem inclined already, you’ll probably want to use a separate site for each blog portal, or instead use country-based redirects to split traffic to one site automatically. I think you probably want the separate sites since what you REALLY want is language-based redirects as described in that doc, but I can’t recommend them as they don’t currently work as well as they could, but that is a possibility that will be unlocked in coming months by some feature work we’re doing on our redirects service, and/or this feature: https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/edge-handlers/
    This would only make sense for the single site with multiple translations, as I see it. But if your codebase for 1.mydomain.com and 2.mydomain.com etc are all the same, you may be able to use a single site to handle serving those - we have a feature where *.yourdomain.com is served by a single site (and your client side javascript “shows different things” baed on the hostname - e.g. is smart enough to show client1logo.png vs client2logo.png based on the hostname alone).

  3. I don’t know of any good / Netlify-compatible internationalization tools to help with that, but I am sure some are out there. Should be possible today though!

  4. the default with the CMS is that indeed, each publish (there is a possibility to have a draft/review/published [editorial workflow](Configuration Options | Netlify CMS | Open-Source Content Management System where not every save republishes the production site).

Some additional guidance:

  • since you are reselling netlify as a hosting platform, you will need a Pro or higher account with us to avoid violating our terms of service
  • shouldn’t be any systemic limitations to mix/matching ssg’s and CMS’s - you’ll have to configure & debug the connections, but it is a frequent use pattern in our customers that work well
  • you may like to look into templating with a “Deploy to Netlify” button or other file-based configuration in case you end up with multiple repositories with your SSG/frontend code in. Won’t need to have multiple repos for your setup, since you can have multiple repos for content all associated with a single repo for the code, as long as everyone is using the same SSG with the same settings - but your long term plans do sound like you’ll benefit to some degree from this.

Let me know if you have any specific followup questions such as “ok, I tried setting up what you described like ABC and XYZ happened” or “could you show me an example country redirect for this pattern?” and I’ll be happy to help!