Use a single WP installation instead of three

Question

I have an already running website, say www.example.com and I want to add a few extra sections to it, they'll be News, Career and Case Studies whose links need to be

www.example.com/news/
www.example.com/career/
www.example.com/case-studies/

The content is similar to how a blog post is so a wordpress blog is best suited as a CMS for these pages. What I wanted to do was to install wordpress in the root of the website and use categories for News, Career and Case Studies. These categories would create links like this

www.example.com/category/news/
www.example.com/category/career/
www.example.com/category/case-studies/

This is fine but the problem is I already have an index.php file in the root and deleting or renaming the wordpress's index.php broke the whole installation. So what would be a solution to get category links like above while still keeping my existing site intact.

Is it possible to install wp in a subdirectory but have the links like www.example.com/news/ or to rename the index.php to something else so it doesn't clash with older files of example.com? If nothing works, I'll have to have three installations of wordpress each in it's own subdirectory which I would keep as a last resort.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly you have main web site which is not WordPress, but you want to implement WordPress Blog inside it, and create premalinks/categories as you described.

If I were handling this requirement, I would go about it by installing separated WP instance on subdomain, such as blog.example.com , and then create categories like this

blog.example.com/category/news/
blog.example.com/category/career/
blog.example.com/category/case-studies/

Additionally, you can create HTTP 301 redirection(s), and "map" some virtual URL-s to your blog. For example, you can map www.example.com/category/news/ to blog.example.com/category/news/ , so if user visits category on main page it will be redirected to appropriate sub domain.

Technical details: HTTP Redirection(s) are usually created inside .htaccess file, good tutorial about this can be found on page, http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/redirects/setting-up-a-301-permanent-redirect-via-htaccess

Example HTTP 301 redirection would look like this:

Redirect 301 /category/news/ http://blog.example.com/category/news

Important note: Creating multiple WordPress installations just to cover different categories is not an option. It will cause you various of issues in future (updates, same design, multiple plugins, analytics, tracking).