Comments on: Multiple WP Blogs On One WP Core

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:32:40 +0000

Just thought I’d follow up – the project I was working on ended up making heavy use of switching the db prefix (with $wpdb->set_prefix()), and it works great. The key is to hook in right before you need to use the other db, and switch it back right after – as long as you dont do either of those things too early or late, it works like a charm.

However, I can’t think of a single reason this would be useful outside of what I was using it for, which was using a single wordpress admin panel to manage a collection of remote wordpress installs. It was a fun exercise regardless.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:39:19 +0000

Instinctively, I’d agree – and I’m not throwing it up on any production sites at the moment – but if you get a chance, give it a try – I haven’t been able to get anything to misbehave yet!

As for the particular project I mentioned, it looks like it’s not going to do the trick – however, I’m experimenting with the idea of switching the $table_prefix on the post_save hook, running wp_insert_post(), and switching it back when it’s done, because I need to duplicate posts in certain situations.

If anything interesting comes of it, I’ll let you know.

By: Will

Will — Sat, 23 May 2009 02:24:11 +0000

That’s an interesting idea, but I really think it’s something that would probably best be avoided.

Changing a setting variable in the middle of the request seems like it could cause more trouble than it’d be worth.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:59:47 +0000

Incredible – I just stumbled across this trick earlier today, then I check my feed reader, and here you are talking about it already:). You beat me to it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of one interface to make posts to multiple bogs, and, while I haven’t been able to come up with anything useful, you can get some really interesting results if you change the $table_prefix value later in the load series – like at the plugins_loaded action.

I haven’t taken the time to really figure out what is happening, but if you change it there, you’ll get a blog with settings that match the tables from the prefix in wp_config, but posts from the prefix that you set at plugins_loaded. It’s almost eerie how you can get the info from 2 places, but everything still works. Even the front end will pull from the second tables, and load properly.

As with so many of the other things I discover, I haven’t found anything useful to do with it yet – but it’s a fun experiment anyway.