I am responsible to select a best drupal solution for my spiritual organization. I am pretty new to drupal but not to CMS. I have working experience with wp & joomla.
Our basic organization structure is 1. Headquarters(just one) 2. Temples(50+) 3. Centers(200+) .. Primary functionality I am looking for is creating multiple websites (for each temple & center) ... All temples need one type of functionality & all centers need to have one type of functionality and main head quarters need different functionality.
Also we need to able to create a new website by copying earlier configured website, which helps avoid configuring every time a temple or center launched.
We are not programmers and I not planning for any custom coding.
Drupal experts, please let me best avaliable drupal multiple sites solution either a pre-packed distribution or installation profile.
I really appreciate your response.
Comments
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Sounds like you might be able to handle this with the http://drupal.org/project/og module (perhaps using the subdomain module if you can have the separate sites be in the same tld).
The best approach depends on
The best approach depends on how much you want to separate each location into its own unique website, and how much difficulty/complexity are you willing to endure to get there.
If the content for each location can be housed in a single page, the easiest solution would be to create content types for temples and centers, use a minimalistic theme that makes the content the center of attention, and configure your path settings to domain/temple-name. This way you can manage all temples and centers as content types of a single site (with details and pictures as you see fit,) and people can access each independent location with a url such as mysite.com/my-temple.
The extra mile
With some additional work (usually some custom coding,) you can also use subdomains for the urls (my-temple.mysite.com,) set independent themes for each item so that each location has its own look and feel, or assign a unique domain for each location (my-temple.com.)
Can you give us an idea of
Can you give us an idea of the specifics of the functionality you need for each site (Headquarters site vs. Center site vs. Temple site).
I worked on a similar project for an international Baptist organization. They had various levels of organizations that needed easy-to-duplicate website functionality.
I sense that you might need a little help from a Drupal integration shop to get your program up and running, but I think Drupal would be an excellent choice for this type of test case.
Domain Access
I've used this for a Drupal install that shares content across several sites.
http://drupal.org/project/domain
You set up DNS for each domain and point them all to the virtual host where your site is hosted. Then in Drupal you can set up the domains and specify what content, themes, users, etc can be used for each 'site'.