Add additional subdirectory to Wordpress multisite URL

Question

I'm having trouble figuring out how to add an additional subdirectory to a subdirectory-based Wordpress multiste. The client decided to switch up the permalink structure a couple months into the project.

Currently I have the main site:

example.com

And the subsites:

example.com/subsite

However, now we want to change the subsites to:

example.com/schools/subsite

I tried changing it within the Network Admin (under sites) and even doing a database search and replace, to no avail. Not sure what the next step is, and I'm not finding a ton of relevant information on Google (mostly stuff on migrating from subdirectory to subdomain or vice versa).

Any help is super appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

WordPress only expects your site path to be one level deep so nested folders will not be found, to change this default behaviour you need to use a WordPress dropin called sunrise.php, this file is ran before the multisite is loaded so it can be used to load the correct site.

This is quoted from Paulund which have a good tutorial on how to achieve what you want :)

If you're not familiar with dropins, take a look at this.