Running multiple blogs with WordPress

WordPress is an excellent blogging tool. It has one shortcoming though. It does support multiple blogs setup within a single installation. Maybe there are some plugins to fix it, but I didn’t look for them yet. The situation is easy to control to a certain degree.

For one of my upcoming projects, I need to have two blogs – one in Russian language and another in English. They will have separate posts, separate comments, separate configurations, and even different design. But I want them to have the same users. Here is how I solved the problem:

1. Extract latest.tar.gz into the /english/ directory for the first blog.
2. Extract latest.tar.gz into the /russian/ directory for the second blog.
3. Modify file /english/wp-config.php to have “wp_eng_” as table prefix.
4. Modify file /russian/wp-config.php to have “wp_rus_” as table prefix.
5. Install both instanses using the same database information (database name, username, password, and host).
6. Modify file /russian/wp-settings.php to use a different table for user information. Change this line (approximately line number 43):

   $wpdb->users            = $table_prefix . 'users';

   to look like:

   $wpdb->users            = 'wp_eng_' . 'users';

7. Optionally, wp_rus_users table can be dropped from the database.

That’s all folks.