Multiple WP Sites Same Server – Share WP Base?

Sharing single set of core files without multisite is a setup technique that kind of make sense, yet kind of very under explored – exactly because multisite exists.

The latest iteration of it (that I know of) has been suggested by Mark Jaquith to be:

sites
  |__ ms.dev
  | |__ content
  | |__ index.php
  | |__ wp => ../../wordpress/stable
  | |__ wp-config.php
  |__ one.dev
  | |__ content
  | |__ index.php
  | |__ wp => ../../wordpress/stable
  | |__ wp-config.php
  |__ two.dev
  | |__ content
  | |__ index.php
  | |__ wp => ../../wordpress/stable
  | |__ wp-config.php
wordpress
  |__ 3.5.2
  |__ 3.6
  |__ stable => 3.6
  |__ wp-config.php

Note that symlinks are used to “fake” core files still being present in every site. Trying to load JS resources from different domain is problematic because of browsers’ security measures. With subdirectory layout it should be trivial to exclude them from backups, etc.