3 WordPress Instances - is there a solution?

Question

A website I work on is currently running three different instances of Wordpress blogs, all with their own set of users & permissions, plugins and themes.

Unforauntely, I don't think Wordpress Network is a viable option due to the restrictions around where sub-blogs can be in terms of urls.

Here are the url structures of each blog:

1. sub.domain.com/blog-1 (lives in web_root/blog)
2. sub.domain.com/folder/blog-2 (lives web_root/blog-2, being aliased to folder via Apache)
3. sub.domain.com/blog-2 (lives in web_root/blog-2)

sub.domain.com is a Zend Framework website to complicate matters where all requests for files that don't physically exists are being rewritten to sub.domain.com/index.php

Any thoughts on how I can consolidate these instances into one Wordpress install? Thanks.

Answer 1

I am a huge fan of wordpress MU. There is no problem having separate user stores, and using separate plugins.

It will make updating Wordpress software 3 times easier.

Export all of the blogs and then import them into one Wordpress instance. The only strange one is sub.domain.com/folder/blog-2 but you can use the same apache mod_rewrite trick to redirect it to the lower folder.

Answer 2

I recommend a system called WP-Hive. It's a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to point as many urls with whatever structure you want to the same WordPress installation. So you can install WordPress once, then "activate" your other blogs through WP-Hive

1. sub.domain.com/blog-1 - Install WordPress in web_root/blog
2. sub.domain.com/folder/blog-2 - Set up through WP-Hive
3. sub.domain.com/blog-2 - Set up through WP-Hive

You'll end up with one filesystem and one database (with different tables for each blog) but 3 separate sites.

I use this for my personal blogs (which are all on separate domains) and for some blogs I host (which are either on different subdomains or in different subfolders, depending on the site).