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Installing Multiple WordPress Blogs – Installing WordPress in Separate Folders

Comments Off RSS Site Feed Author: AITpro Admin
Published: May 14, 2010
Updated: October 6, 2012

The orginal question was regarding how to correctly install multiple WordPress blog installations.

You can have as many WordPress blogs installed under one hosting account as you want as long as they are all installed in separate folders and have separate SQL databases installed for each WordPress blog. It sounds like you have done this correctly.

WordPress should be installed to the root of each of these new folders you created. If you install WordPress to a subfolder like exampleblog1.com/blog then you have just unnecessarily added another subfolder that you didn’t need to add, unless of course you want to install 2 blogs under the root of one domain. In that scenario you would be using one WordPress installation as a main site and then the other WordPress installation would be a designated blog site under the main site.

On the root of your domain / website you want to create these folders and then install WordPress separately into each folder. This is the best structure and naming convention to avoid name resolution problems and many other problems.

exampleblog1.com
exampleblog2.com
exampleblog3.com

Before I answer the question, as I understand it, I want to point this out. There are a couple of different ways to set up your WordPress blog. The default state of your WordPress blog is to have all your latest posts posted to your blog home page in typical blog fashion ie most current post is posted at the top, next oldest post is below, next post, etc. An alternative WordPress blog setup is to have a your home page be a static page. Which then means you can designate another page as your “official” blog page on your website. The practical use for this setup method is when you want your Home page to have content on it that you want to pretty much stay consistently the same instead of having all your latest posts posted on your home page.

Ok so now the answer:

Click on your Settings Panel in your WordPress Blog.
Click on General.
You will see these 2 setting options:
WordPress address (URL)
Blog address (URL) Enter the address here if you want your blog homepage to be different from the directory you installed WordPress.

This gives you the option to designate a different blog homepage besides the default root of your website and which is going to also be your homepage. If you see exampleblog1.com/blog as your URLs under your general settings this means that you installed WordPress to the exampleblog1.com/blog folder and not the root folder, which would not have /blog on the end of the URL. If this is the case I recommend that you move your WordPress blog by following these instructions >>> http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress >>> it is quick and easy to do. Unless of course you intend to have a main WordPress website and then another WordPress website under that main site acting as a separate blog. The AITpro main WordPress website has another WordPress installation under a subfolder called /aitpro-blog. I wanted to have my main site not look and act like a typical WordPress blog and wanted my blog to look and act completely like a WordPress blog. Both sites look visually identical so to a visitor they cannot tell that they are actually switching between two different WordPress sites – you get the best of all worlds using this method. In contrast you can have a WordPress blog not look like a blog at all and even hide the designated blog posting page like I did here (I used the Exclude pages from Navigation WordPress plugin) >>> http://www.visionsign.net/vision/

So let’s say you want to set up your Home page as a static page, which in your case you may or may not want or decide to do. You would then create a new blog page or designate an existing page on your website to be the designated “official” blog page instead of the home page.

To setup up a static home page (Front Page) and a designated Blog page (Posts Page)
Click on your Settings panel.
Click on Reading.
You will see these options.
Front page displays either your latest posts option or a static page.
Then you just choose whatever page you want as your Front page and whatever page you want as your Posts page.

Hopefully I answered your question and maybe gave you some more ideas and options to think about. One thing I would like to impress on you is that it is better to set things up optimally right from the very beginning, otherwise you could end up costing yourself a lot of time if you end up having to redesign your WordPress blog later on. Good luck!

Official WordPress Resource Page on Installing Multiple WordPress Blogs
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