From my understanding, you will need to use Multisite, which IS one instance of WP. You should do a Multisite subdirectory setup with a different site for each product – e.g. product1, product2. Then either use Donncha’s or WP Ebooks’ domain mapping pluggin to map your custom domain name to your sites.
mainwebsite.com/product1 —> differentdomainname.com
You can set your menus up so that you can access all of your products (or sites) from one menu. And you can certainly manage all of the sites in the backend from one place.
Best wishes to you.
Thanks, Naomi! Will start my look into it!
@naomi, but won’t all the domains remap to the original domain? I’m using a domain mapping plugin and I have several domains pointing to the same MS install, but they always get remapped to the primary domain for that blog… I do believe there is a hack to change this behaviour but it’s not default.
If you’re using a proper domain mapping plugin and map a domain to one of the sites on your Multisite install, it will map exactly to the site you mapped it to. It doesn’t get remapped to another site unless you have something setup improperly.
So
differentdomainname.com will map to mainwebsite.com/product1.
and
differentdomainnamealso.com will map to mainwebsite.com/product2
If you’re using Donncha’s plugin, you’ll need to set differentdomainname.com as your primary domain so visitors will only see differentdomainname.com and not mainwebsite.com/product1
Also, you cannot domain map your primary domain.
Hope that helps.
I see the error in my thinking, I don’t know what I was thinking.
Something along the lines of having multiple domains mapped to the one SUB-blog (not multiple domains to different blogs), if a request comes in on one of the domains that’s not the primary domain (for that sub-blog), it will get remapped to the primary domain.
Basically, what you’ve said in the paragraph about Donncha’s plugin, which incidentally is the one I’m using 🙂
