Alternative to multiple WordPress installs (and not using WordPress-mu)

I run several instances of WordPress on a server for managing blogs across multiple domains (also hosted on the same server). Some domains are even utilizing multiple WordPress instances just as subdirectories.

What is the best way of implementing those instances so they can all be kept up-to-date easily? Right now, about a week or two after a release of WP, I login and manually update every instance from the newly-downloaded tar.gz.

The only thing I have shared between all instances are the content items (themese, etc). I handle that via symbolically linking to the 'main' content directory form each instance's install path.

Is there a way of doing something similar with the actual code portions of WordPress? I believe the only instance-specific configurations are for what database to connect-to.

Solution 1:

Why not use WordPress-mu, isn't that what it's designed for? FYI Wordpress 3, due for release in about three months, will have -mu integrated.

Until then, you could probably just symlink all the core files, basically everything except the config files or user content directories.

Solution 2:

WPMU with the multi site plugin (http://www.google.com/search?q=1193384369_njsl-sites-009.php) does the trick perfectly.

You can actually host domains just by having different blogs by using a Domain Mapping plugin but this way keeps the whole lot seperate (but same code/db).

Solution 3:

I have not tested, but thought that unionfs, might be a tool that could be helpful for something like this. Unionfs is a tool frequently on livecds to have a portion of the filesystem come from the read-only CD, and some of it go to a RAM-Disk. I have never done or tested this, but I thought you could do something like this

/base-wp-dir = base wordpress files
/instance1-files = files related to a specific instance of wp
/instance2-files
/www/instance1-union = rw-/instance1-files,ro-/base-wp-dir
/www/instance2-union = rw-/instance2-files,ro-/base-wp-dir

So basically when it is time to upgrade, you unmount all the union instance folders, update word-press in the base folder, and then remount your unions.

Here is a nice Linux Journal article about unionfs.

Solution 4:

This is an old question, but it is worth noting that Wordpress's 3.0 release merged Wordpress-MU into Wordpress. So now, the default Wordpress 3.0 installation allows easy multi-site setup, maintenance and upgrades.