Several of you have asked this question, so let’s chat about it. I run two blogs off of the Elizabeth Anne Designs domain, Weddings and Living. There are many different ways to run two blogs on the same domain, and I’ll start with the way I chose…

(Sounds like it would be way harder than that, doesn’t it?)

The upside: Can have different categories, users, plugins, you-name-it-it-can-be-differents on the two blogs.

The downside: You’ve got two blogs now.  Two sets of plugins to upgrade, two things to keep in sync if you make changes.

Julie and Sally want to house their blogs on the same domain within the same WordPress installation.  Because WordPress creates both author pages and RSS feeds for each author by default, this one is relatively easy.

Our example domain will be www.mycookingsite.com

• Install WordPress once
• Create a page that will be your front page and link to both of your blogs.  The link to Julie’s blog will be: www.mycookingsite.com/author/julie and Sally’s will be: www.mycookingsite.com/author/sally
• Create a page that will be for all posts (you don’t have to display the page anywhere)
• Under Settings → Reading, set your blog front page to the page that you created and the posts page to the page for all posts
• Create two users, one for Julie and one for Sally

Two things of note:

1. If you don’t like the /author/ in the URL, here is a thread on WordPress that suggests some plugins to use that will change it.  Note: I have not used these plugins.
2. The RSS feed for the separate blogs is www.mycookingsite.com/author/username/feed

You could also follow the instructions above except instead of using authors, you could use a category for each of your blogs.  Each category has a feed, as authors do.

Julie wants to start two blogs, one for recipes and one for food photography.

• Install WordPress once
• Under Settings → Permalinks, change the category base to your desired wording.  So perhaps Julie would choose “food”.
• Create a page that will be your front page and link to both of your blogs.  The link to the blogs would be: www.mycookingsite.com/food/recipes and www.mycookingsite.com/food/photography
• Create a page that will be for all posts (you don’t have to display the page anywhere)
• Under Settings → Reading, set your blog front page to the page that you created and the posts page to the page for all posts
• Create two categories, one for recipes and one for photography.
• When you create posts, assign them to one of the two categories.

The last alternative is something we haven’t even come close to talking about yet, but if you are not a newbie to WordPress you will know about the Custom Taxonomy feature.  Justin Tadlock explains it really well in this post.

In all of the options that use existing WordPress functionality, category and tag archives will combine the posts from both blogs.

If everything after the first paragraph was Greek to you, then choose option 1. :)

Do any WordPress experts have an option that I didn’t consider?