There are countless tutorials around the web for setting up a Magento multi-store. Many of them are incorrect, many of them are incomplete, many of them won’t work for every hosting set up.

Just like WordPress MU, Magento multi-store is far simpler if your hosting plan uses cPanel. Plesk does things somewhat differently and can be more fiddly but if you’re looking for a fully fledged multi-store environment in Magento where different stores can look differently and resolve to different domains entirely and your server is equipped with Parallels Plesk, then this is for you!

Please note: If you want a Magento multi-store environment but you aren’t using Plesk, then this tutorial isn’t going to be much use to you as what will work for you will differ slightly (but feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and post another tutorial for your scenario too).

Configuring Magento

Step 1

So the first step, is to set up your stores in Magento as necessary. For the sake of this example, we already have a store set up (default) in Magento and we’re going to create two additional stores (store 2 and store 3) which are going to run on the domains store1.com and store2.com (imaginative I know).

Navigate to System > Manage Stores and you will be presented with something similar to the below.

Step 2

The next step is to create your new website name, store name and store view name. These can essentially be anything you like as long they are clearly labelled so you know which store each represents in your Magento store view selector.

When you have set these up, you will have something like the below.

You will have noticed that when creating the stores, you will have a ‘Root Category’ option, if you just selected the only option there (likely labelled ‘Root Catalog’), then this means that each store will share the same category structure of products (you will still be able to customise each product per store) but if you want a completely different category structure for different stores, then you will need to go to Catalog > Manage Categories and create a new root category. Then you can go back into the store within ‘Manage Stores’ and change the root category for each store as you want it.

Step 3

Now that you have multiple stores set up within your Magento admin, you’ll be able to configure differently per store/store view, like next for example, we’ll need to specify the domains for each store.

Navigate to System > Configuration > GENERAL > Web and then select your second store from the ‘Current Configuration Scope’ like the below shows.

Once you have selected your newly created second store, open up ‘Unsecure’ from the accordion shown above and in the base URL, you will insert the domain that ‘Store 2’ will use, in our example, this will be http://www.store2.com/ (always make sure you include the trailing slash here). You will also need to open up ‘Secure’ and set the ‘Base URL’ here too, if you will be serving content securely with an SSL certificate, then the only difference will be https instead of http otherwise it will be the same as the ‘Unsecure’ Base URL.

So at this point, you might have something similar to the below.

Step 4

You will need to specify which theme folders you wish to use for each store which again, like the above, navigate to System > Configuration > GENERAL > Design, select the store from the ‘Current configuration scope’ and open up ‘Package’ from the accordion like below.

You will need to enter the package name as the name of the folder as highlighted in the directory path below:-

/app/design/frontend/package/theme/...

For example:-

/app/design/frontend/store2/default/...

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That’s pretty much all there is to the base Magento multi-store set up, then we head over to Plesk to continue the more complex part of the set up.

Configuring Plesk

Step 1

Log in to your Plesk panel and add your additional domains in the way you would usually so that the relevant folder and other Plesk set up is in place for them.

Repeat this for as many domains as necessary (hopefully you will have already pointed the nameservers for your domains to the same server where your Magento is installed, otherwise, do this).

Step 2

You will then need to set up the appropriate environment which in this case, as far as Plesk goes, you’ll have multiple domains set up but for the domains that will serve your additional stores in Magento, these will essentially map to the document root of your main store and already existing domain (thus sharing the same Magento installation).

And do to this, you will need to create what is known as a symbolic link (symlink).

First though, go back into the hosting settings for your newly created domains in Plesk and set the document root to /symlink instead of /httpdocs (can be named anything but at least you’ll know specifically what this directory is for with this name) for each like the below.

Step 3

Next, you will need SSH access to your server which is terminal access over the Linux command line. Not all web hosts will provide this depending on your hosting plan but you will need to enquire with them as to whether they can provide this for you or complete these steps on your behalf.

In your terminal, you will want to browse the location of the new domains, so for store2:-

And you should see that the symlink directory was created in here (as per when you set it as the document root in Plesk). You will need to delete this directory though as it is not possible to create a symlink for a directory/file that already exists:-

Then you can create the symlink (replacing domain.com with the actual domain of your existing Magento site):-

Then you will need to set the correct ownership for the symlink (the second store and the username you would have chosen for the subscriber in step one of the Plesk configuration above) otherwise the second store will not be able to access anything in the existing Magento root:-

Step 4

Next, you will need to configure a directive in the PHP settings for the second store in Plesk, open_basedir. This allows the second store to open files outside of it’s own web space that Plesk created.

It is easiest to modify this from within the Plesk panel directly which you can do by navigating to the domain and opening up ‘PHP Settings’. Scroll down until you see the open_basedir directive like below:-

And just like the above, select ‘Enter custom value’ and insert with:-

Replace domain.com with the domain that your existing Magento installation sits in of course. Save your changes. Almost there now.

Finishing Up

Then we need to head back into the Magento and configure your Magento’s index.php to serve the correct store from Magento depending on which domain is being requested in the browser.

Open up index.php in your desired text editor from your Magento root and find umask(0); in the file.

Directly underneath, insert the following:-

You will want to use the website code you set for the relevant store in step two of configuring Magento above as the $_SERVER["MAGE_RUN_CODE"].

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That should be it. If everything is implemented correctly, you should be able to load your additional domains in your browser like store2.com and see it load the theme that you have selected for this store in Magento as per step four of ‘Configuring Magento’ above.

Note: Repeat the above steps for each additional domain you are setting up to run a store on in Magento’s multi-store environment.

See how you get on following the above steps and if you run into any trouble, feel free to leave a comment below. Good luck!