Overview
For automated church websites to work smoothly and efficiently, certain DNS record entries need to be considered. There should be a wildcard DNS entry made so that the churches can be added to the templates dynamically, creating the website for the local church.
Even if possible, please do not manually create subdomains for each church entry unless required by your IT team.
How to
Example root domain: my-conference.org
What we want to be able to do is add any subdomain to the front of that root domain name. So when you add an automated church website, it would look something like this: my_church.my-conference.org
Note! It is important to check the CNAME record in the Web Engine backend before following the directions below:
- Navigate to the Website settings
- Verify the CNAME value under the important section
- Before using the values below.
- Open your DNS Control Panel for the root domain name.
- Verify that there is no current wildcard entry in the list of DNS rules. Look for something like this:
- Host/Name: *
- If this record is there, please find out why it is there before proceeding with the following. We don't know your system. Therefore, do not make the changes below without understanding why that wildcard entry is already there in your system!
If there is no existing wildcard entry, you will need to create a new record using the DNS control panel.
- Click on “Create a new record” in the DNS panel and create a wildcard record.
- Type: CNAME
- Host/Name: *
- Value/Points to: cname.vercel-dns.com. (verify this value under website settings)
- TTL: Auto (or the default value allowed)
Wildcard DNS only catches names that do not already have an explicit record.
Once this step is completed. You can configure your conference entity to use the root domain when creating the automated church websites. If you don't have access to configure your entity, please reach out to your administrator.
In the upper left corner of the screen, click on the arrow to expand the menu for the entity.
- Click on Manage your entity
- Click on the Configuration tab
- Click on Automated domains in the menu on the right, or scroll down to Automated domains
- Add the root domain to the field Root Domain for automated sites
- Click on the Save button
Now, when you go to Manage automated sites to add a new website, the church name should automatically be appended to the front of the configured root domain.