If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve been working on site concepts for a site redesign for a friend. He wants a ’splash’ type of screen at www.hisname.com with options for the different sections (4 total, counting the actual blog) of his site. The problem I had was twofold -

1. If WordPress was at www.hisname.com, the ’splash’ page would get in the way of WordPress using index.php. If I put WordPress at www.hisname.com/blog, then all of the other sections would live in /blog. Not what I wanted.

2. I need to be able to make it so that the sidebar navigation is different for each section. If I used a single WordPress install, I’d have to create a page for each section (with slug /section1, /section2, etc.). That would be ok, but I need the sidebar stuff to be different for each of the sections. (Like, for example, I don’t want the blog archive on /section1 or /section2, but I do want it on /blog.)

I started looking around for ways to make WordPress do multiple blogs with 1 installation. I found this site that has pretty straightforward instructions on making /blog, /section1, /section2, /section3 all separate WordPress blogs.

For a site like I’m working on, it ads some to the administrative overhead, but not a whole lot. All of the sections (except /blog) will be pretty static once it’s all setup and running, so administration shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ll make all four sections (which are really now 4 blogs) have the same theme, layout, graphics, etc. so that the users will never know the difference. Very cool.

The instructions on that site, like much open source goodness, aren’t professionally written; but if you have half of a clue what WordPress does and you understand symbolic linking, you can handle this.

The only thing that I really had trouble with was that it doesn’t support putting WordPress in its own directory. I usually put my blogs at www.site.com and WordPress at www.site.com/wordpress. You could probably change the code to make it support that, but I just opted to go with what works.

I’m not moving too far forward with development on this yet, so if some of you guru geeks know a better way to do all of this, I’m all ears.