Why quickly duplicate WordPress sites

A year ago I searched for a way of duplicating WordPress blogs quickly. For now I will give you the reasoning and then (in a later post the how).

Going through Cpanel you can install a hosted WordPress blog in less than five minutes. Then it takes me about two hors to set up the blog the way I like. That includes setting the premalink URLS, getting rid of the hello world post and about pages, making the blogrol the way I like it, having the right plugins active with the right settings and so on.

I thought that it would be fantastic if I could replicate a prototype blog in a few minutes rather than one to two hours it was taking to set up anew blog.

I asked at various sites including the WordPress.org forum,and did not get an answer. Eventually I discovered the answr thanks to a mistake or a series of mistakes. I’ll give you the clue. Everything about a blog is in the MySQL database. So if you save the database and import it to to another blog you have basically duplicated the blog.

I’ll soon make a video of the technique. I may before hand write more about the method here.

While talking about techniques here is the way to update your video card driver.

How to run multiple WordPress Blogs on a single MySQL database?

Some hosting companies limit the number of MySQL databases allowed. So it is usefull to use a single MySQL database for many blogs. One solution is to use WordPressMU (multiuser). Problem it is not on fantastico and you have to install it manually – I have done it – it is trivial if you are used to FTP, cresting MySQL databases etc.

However, I am not using my WPMU for multiple blogs as it is not one hundred percent compatible with all the themes and plugins.

So back to running multiple WP blogs on a single MySQL database:

1. Create your first WP blog (either through fantastico or manually).
2. Download the wp-config.php file from the blog directory.
3. Change the line: // You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
   $table_prefix  = ‘wpag2_’;   // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
   the $table_prefix is changed say from wpag1_ to wpag2_ as in above case.
4. Copy the files of the WP blog to the new directory.
   say from /public_html/domain1 to /public_html/domain2
5. Now upload the new edited wp-config.php (I find it easiest to use wordpad for editing this file) to the new directory (/public_html/domain2 in the above example).
6. Point your browser to the directory: http://www.domain2.com and it will lead you through the rest of the installation process (very easy).

There is another previous version of this post on another one of my blogs. Very soon I’ll make a video of this operation since I suppose a video is worth one thousand and one words. I’ll let you know where to see that video once it is ready.