WordPress and multiple blogs

In order to have two weblogs running here (changelog and changelog notebook) I have to have two copies of WordPress running. This isn’t a huge problem, but makes merging the two content sets difficult. This is a bigger problem on my personal weblog, since I post a lot of movie and book reviews which can end up pushing everything off the front page. I can hack the main WP loop to exclude the appropriate categories, but that becomes troublesome as the number of categories to be excluded becomes large. What I really want is something similar to Textpattern’s sections feature. What this allows you to do is separate content into bins while maintaining a consistent category set across them. I guess you could call this vertical and horizontal classification of content. I keep thinking about how I could add this into WordPress but I’m note sure where to start.

One idea is to overload the category feature by making each category a “section” and use sub-categories as divisions in those categories. There might be some difficulty in filtering content on the front page, and certainly some .htaccess magic would need to happen to give each category its own top-level URL.

Another idea is to use the categories as sections and then use a keyword/tag plugin for categorizing content across sections.

Ideally this could be implemented in the code itself (a plugin seems unlikely given the way WordPress works). In a sense WordPress MultiUser is doing something like this, though I haven’t tried it out to see how close it comes.

Has anyone else ever thought about how to do this in WordPress?

One Response to “WordPress and multiple blogs”


  1. I don’t understand what it is WordPress isn’t doing and what you want it to do.

    I think I know and I’ve thought about it a lot myself.