This is early experimental. And, I’ve also marked this post into the “personal” category, because you wouldn’t want your clients to have too much access, especially if they share a single WordPress installation. Now I know there’s the WordPress MU project, but I guess I can’t use it in this case, because WordPress MU assumes your URLs will be within the same domain (either subdomains or directories).
The reason I want multiple sites to be driven by one single WordPress installation is because I’m really tired of upgrading everytime. Upgrading the WordPress Core once in a while is okay, but when you’ve got a list of 30 plugins, it’s a pain in the neck upgrading two or three every day on every single blog and website you run. Automatic updates is not a choice, as I want to take a look at what I’m updating to before actually doing it, at least once.
I won’t be doing this from scratch. I’ll start by merging this blog and the Foller.me blog into a single installation. Single doesn’t mean they share the same database, all they share is the WordPress core files, plugins and themes. Yes, this may be dangerous, because not all the plugins store the data in the database (though I believe they should, at least when they’re capable of doing that). Now imagine the Next Gen Gallery (or perhaps any other gallery plugin) being shared over two websites within one WordPress installation. The albums are stored in one folder called gallery. So there might be a conflict if two albums have the same name. There might be an option to store the files in a different directory, and hope that option is stored in the database, will check on that later.
One more issue.. Remember I said personal projects? And assigned the post to the personal category? If you’ve got some clients who are hosted on WordPress, and you’re doing some admin things for them but they DO have admin rights in their admin panels, then I wouldn’t go with this stuff, as it’ll be quite difficult to restrict them from changing eachothers themes and plugins that they share. Get my point?
kay, now the trick will be in the wp-config.php file. We’ll basically look at the incoming address using some regular expression or whatever. If it’s based on kovshenin.com, then we connect to database 1, otherwise, if it’s based on blog.foller.me we connect to the 2nd database, and so on. Pretty simple, huh? If you’re a total freak you might wanna try changing just the prefix, thus having multiple websites, one WordPress installation, one database and a bunchload of tables ;)
I’ve no idea if this will alter the overall performance, but keeping total visitors under ~ 20,000 per day should be just fine ;) I’ll get back at you with another post next week, hopefully with some tests and some results. Cheers!
Kostya: I LOVE this idea!!! I can't wait to see if you can get it working. This could be big.
Thanks Tim, I'll do my best :)
Read the second part of the topic, it seems that it's fairly possible, with a few wordpress hacks (p.s. there are no core hacks, only wp-config.php and index.php changes)
Hey K! Quite good, I like your idea and I can help you with some experimenting if you would like.
Thanks, yeah, that would be so awesome!
I've created a script that does all this for you. You can use as many databases as you'd like and as many content directories as you'd like on just one install of WordPress. It comes with an installer to make it very easy. Check it out over at wpmultisite.com
Glenn, nice script, although I dumped this idea a few days ago as I started experiencing problems with caching plugins ;)