Wordpress install and configuration
Downloading and configuring wordpress on fedora core 6 (FC6) is fairly straightforward. Some questions I had were: what is the best installation and configuration process for setting up multiple blogs, and how easy is it to back up and update each blog?
I found it easier to use the download package from the wordpress website instead of the fedora yum package. I just downloaded the gzip file, unpacked in the target directory, and created a wp-config.php file. I decided to utilize one mysql database and use prefixes for each different blog. To make life easy I used one database login accross all blogs.
I set up apache virtualhosts for each blog. The web address that is configured in the virtualhost should match the address in Wordpress. This is because wordpress stores the hostname in the database. ServerAlias’s should probably be avoided by using redirects to a single host instead.
<VirtualHost>
ServerName joe.junkin.com
ServerAdmin admin@spammenot.com
DocumentRoot /home/apacheuser/html/blog/jjunkin
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/wp__error.log
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/wp_access.log common
DirectoryIndex index.php
<Directory>
# would allow .htaccess to be read
# AllowOverride FileInfo Options
# instead. this disallows .htaccess
AllowOverride None
# the stuff needed for permalinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
When I tried to switch to date and named based permalinks I received a webserver crash. This was because in my VirtualHost AllowOverride was set to None or Options. I needed to add FileInfo to allow Apache to process the local .htaccess. After I just decided to move the necessary code to the VirtualHost section within Apache and changed the AllowOverride back to None (as above).