Linking a Separate Domain to WordPress

There are at least three ways of doing it I can imagine:

1. Solve the whole thing on the Apache level by rewriting mysitenet.com/* to mystandardblog.com/category/X/*.
2. Deploy two copies of WordPress storing data in the same database. mystandardblog.com would be a regular blog, while mysitenet.com would have a specially tweaked theme designed to display only one category.
3. Deploy two regular and independent copies of WordPress, but install FeedWordPress or similar plugin on mysitenet.com and configure it to import the Category X feed from mystandardblog.com.

How would I implement option 3? I tried setting up wordpress again, and entering the database information for my first site in the wp-config.php file and it didn’t work.

If you tried setting up the second blog to work off the first blog’s database, you were going with option 2, not 3. Not all hosting companies would allow this setup; many hosting companies set restrictive permissions on the location of the DB client (i.e., they only allow clients to connect from certain IP addresses).

To set up option 3, you need to set up the second blog completely independently from the first. Then, on the first blog, you need to have an RSS feed for the category you want to export into the second blog (this functionality is there already; try acessing mystandardblog.com/category/X/feed; it should produce a feed for category X), and on the second blog, a plugin that would import this feed (FeedWordPress should do the trick).

NC@WP,

Would you mind pointing me in the right direction for implementing your first option? That seems like it’d be the most effective route to take…

I’m basically taking my main site and using it to host wordpress. Then I have 12 different domain names that need to be able to link to 1 of the 16 categories I have. I can’t quite figure it out on my own, so I may outsource the work if I can’t solve this issue, haha.