My wife has a site that needs two WordPress blog installations. The URLs differ by a subdirectory name. Both blogs need to be (URL-wise) subdirectories of /blog/. They need to be completely independent of each other, yet use the same custom theme. And there used to be just a single blog, which was not in a subdirectory; its permalinks must not break. (It has nice URLs with the date and title in them, not post ID-style URLs). And because I’m the husband, I get to maintain it, so tack “easy to maintain” onto the requirements (it must be easy to upgrade WP in both blogs, for example). In this article I’ll show you how I did it with a single .htaccess file, a single copy of WordPress, two MySQL databases, and a single configuration file.

Fixing URLs

As I mentioned, there used to be a blog at /blog/ which must not break. Suppose this blog was about dogs and my wife has recently started blogging about cats. She wants two …