j-hai

Okay, I’ve found a workaround for this problem and am posting it here in case it helps someone else.

What situation is this useful for?
In my case, I’m running a setup with one main site and multiple sub-blogs under separate WordPress installs. The main site is located on the top level domain, while the sub-blogs are located under /blogs/blog1, /blogs/blog2, etc.

Now when visitors want to see a list of all the blogs, they’ll intuitively want to go up one level to /blogs/. I wanted this to pull up a page from the WordPress install on the main site that lists all the blogs and their RSS feeds.

This wasn’t possible, however, because WordPress by default checks to see if a subdirectory exists and goes to that instead of a page of the same name. The workaround I describe below isn’t seamless, but it gets the job done well enough from a user browsability standpoint.

Here are the steps:
1) Create a blank index.html file and place it in the top level of your subdirectory.

2) Edit the WordPress page that has the same name as the subdirectory. Change its permalink slightly (for example, in my case I changed it from /blogs to /blogs-all) to distinguish it from the subdirectory.

3) Open up the .htaccess file (or create a new one if you don’t have one yet) in the root of your WordPress install and add the following line, replacing yourdomain and blogs with your own domain and subdirectory names.

redirect 301 /blogs/index.html https://www.yourdomain.com/blogs-all

Now anytime a visitor goes to https://www.yourdomain.com/blogs/, they’ll be automatically redirected to the WordPress page of your choosing.

Two questions:

Following the instructions here, I too was able to share the user tables between multiple WordPress 2.7 installs. However, when writing a post in any of the non-primary blogs, the shared users don’t appear in the Author drop-down box. What am I missing here?

Also, when registering a new user from a non-primary blog, by default that user’s data gets entered into the non-primary blog’s user table. Is there any way to make it so that new users registered on any blog get entered into the shared user table?

Thanks in advance for any input.