One installation of WP on more than one domain

it’s overkill but multisite is probably what you’re after, one installation as many subsites as you like.

Can both sites be powered from the same template files?

do you want them to both look the same but have different content?

Yes, – that’s right.

what kind of stuff does the client want on each site? similar stuff but just hotel specific?

if that’s the case then just one install of wordpress and menu item linking to a main page for each hotel with any other hotel specific stuff needed on pages that are children of the parent hotel category…

Wouldn’t that create a structure like;
hotels.com/hotel1/rooms/room1
hotels.com/hotel2/rooms/room1

Ideally I want each hotel to have it’s own domain so the structure is thus;
hotel1.com/rooms/room1
hotel2.com/rooms/room1

Could this be achieved with your suggestion combined with some sort of url rewrite perhaps?

if it’s two different hotels won’t it have two different room 1’s? if it does then just have two separate sites with different content.

i still advocate the first idea

hotels.com/hotel1/rooms/room1
hotels.com/hotel2/rooms/room1

you can mess about with domain name forwarding but it’s a lot of extra work…

The client would like to manage the content of both site via one wp backend. Both sites using the same template files (just have different user content added).

The client would also like both sites to use their own domains eg. hotel1.com & hotel2.com. It seems that this last requirement is the part that is not so straightforward to achieve…

then multisite is your best option. it’s one install and you can manage both sites from one back end and while you’ll initially have the apparent structure of

hotels.com/hotel1/rooms/room1
hotels.com/hotel2/rooms/room1

it’s easily sorted so that you have a separate domain name pointing to each. use a domain mapping plugin to set this up.

install the same theme on both sites and ensure that any changes you make to one you make to the other and then you can add in all the different content but keep the sites looks and feel consistent.

that’s what i’d do (in fact, it’s what i am doing on a site at the moment)

It seems that this last requirement is the part that is not so straightforward to achieve…

Not perfectly straightforward, but not all that hard either: you just need to add domain mapping to your multisite setup. I (and many others) use the WPMU Domain Mapping plugin to do this, but there are others out there that do the same thing.

If you’re new to multisite, I also recommend @ipstenu’s WordPress Multisite 101 — you’ll want to read that first to get a sense of how your different sites, themes, and content will relate to each other: it’s a bit of a learning curve compared to a single install, but it really does sound like exactly what you need for this job (and not at all overkill, especially compared to trying to manage all those sites separately!)

what amy said ??

Thanks. It seems I’ve some reading to do. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.