Managing multiple blogs more simply

July 15, 2004 2:52 PM

Is there any good solution for multi-url blog software? I've got a bunch of domains, and I want to run different blogs on each of them, but I don't want to have to install, say, a separate copy of Wordpress for each of them (and then have to go update all of them individually when there's an update). They're all located on the same physical server (linux/Apache).

Any ideas?
posted by Caviar to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Response by poster: I would prefer something I can put on my own server. It's likely that I'll want to hack the source in some way, and I'm already set up for hosting.

Free would be good, but if the right thing costs money, that's an option too.
posted by Caviar at 2:58 PM on July 15, 2004

It's trivial to set up Movable Type for this. You just create a directory for each blog in the filesystem, and tell MT that all the files for a given blog go in a the proper directory. Then you point Apache to those directories for the site for each domain you want hosted. Every user uses the same copy of MT and all their posts are stored in the same database. If you are planning to have multiple users and want your users to also have FTP access to these directories, you may have to set up some permissions by hand, but that shouldn't be too onerous for a reasonable number of users.
posted by kindall at 3:07 PM on July 15, 2004

pMachine Pro allows you to run multiple blogs from one installation. You can have them each display on the same page if you want.
posted by dobbs at 3:17 PM on July 15, 2004

I'm partial to blosxom. It's pretty much ideal if you want something simple and hackable.
posted by sfenders at 3:34 PM on July 15, 2004

Seconded: Blosxom and some fiddling with httpd.conf to get the virtual hosts taken care of is all you need. I set up Blosxom with AddHandler and voilia, done.
posted by majick at 6:17 PM on July 15, 2004

Expression Engine does this. All you have to do is put a php file on each domain you want a different blog to show up on. This is in their documentation and it is explicitly allowed in their terms of use.
posted by jonah at 6:27 PM on July 15, 2004