The first thing that might be apparent to most of our visitors is that we are running two domains using the same WordPress theme. What may be less apparent is that we are actually running one domain, one subdomain on the same WordPress install (our bgEngine to be exact) and in fact, are running the two sites on the same set of theme code as well!
What does that really mean? Well, normally when you set up a WordPress powered site, you choose a theme to make it have some sort of unique look and feel. Well, to be fair, if you want a unique look and feel you’ll have to code your own themes like we’ve done with our sites.
With that all laid out, what you are actually seeing with the this Boldly Going Community site is a subdomain off our corporate domain, BoldlyGoing.com where we use conditionals and a tweaked sidebar widget system to allow the two sites to show different content based upon the page/post/domain being called by the browser. By effectively learning how to manipulate the sidebar widget system in WordPress, we are actually running 4 (four) sidebars at the site. Our conditionals dictate the correct left and right bars for the domain being called, and with the use of some better coded widget plugins, we are able to have duplicate content in a sidebar if desired (for instance, we use most of Breukie’s Widgets for two reasons: one, he gets that a widget should be coded to take FULL advantage of the inherent WordPress capabilities that a function (list pages/categories/archives, etc) possesses, and two, he’s added the code to allow for multiple instances of the same widget. And this works perfectly on our set up.
I thought about creating the top navigation element as a widget as well, and in the end decided that I could get the desired functionality (having site specific navigational links and sub-links) with the use of Joseph’s global domainname variable and the conditional choices. Seemed to require less overhead, and in the end we’re always attempting to be as lean as possible.
There are a couple of challenges with this approach however, and as time progresses we’ll have to work them out if we are going to use this technique on a client’s production site. I’ll talk more about those challenges on my write up for BoldlyGoing.com’s portfolio page.
