Multisite Drupal? Trade and Consumer versions of the same site
Hi there,
I'm looking at the feasibility of using Drupal for a solution for a project of mine.
We are building a portal for the travel industry. We are wanting to have two versions of the site - One for Trade customers, one for consumers. They will both look slightly different, only the trade site will have a login/registration. Each site will have a different information focus.
I have read up alot about drupal. Making multi sites, Blocks, Views etc.
What I am a bit confused about is that both of these sites will use **some** of the same content, and a central admin for both would be ideal to that end.
Could someone please tell me if this is easily possible with Drupal? Can we, say, make a node or module and choose whether or not to display it on the consumer site, trade site or both?
Or is this sort of scenario best served by making content-categories for each site, and one for "both" and only displaying those categories on their relevant site pages?
Any tips/links/advice would be really appreciated.
Regards
Aaron
Have you considered the
Have you considered the possibility of using one site with multiple user roles, so the content for both users would be published to the same site but user 1 can only view content 1 and user 2 can only view content 2?
Hi Leotemp, No I havn't
Hi Leotemp,
No I havn't considered that. Mainly because we want both sites to be browsable without logging in.
E.G. a user goes to www.consumersite.com and is able to view the content there freely. But if the same user goes to www.tradesite.com it will appear to be a different site and they will be able to view some content without logging in, but not all.
Can a "user" be ascertained by the URL they are viewing?
Cheers
Aaron
hmm, well im sure you could
hmm, well im sure you could arrange for that kind of logic to occur but it sounds needlessly complex. I believe you were closer to the solution before i talked to you :(
Hopefully this post will keep your request at the top of this list long enough for a seasoned Drupalon to answer your first question.
Thanks very much for your
Thanks very much for your suggestion in any case Leotemp. I'm sure Drupal is perfectly capable of doing this. Just a question of what's the best method?
Two admins won't be the end of the world and is the obvious easy fix, but we would rather globablize the content if we can.
Cheers
Aaron
Yes, I encourage you to
Yes, I encourage you to minimize your interaction requirements as much as humanly possible, I am sure if you keep asking around you will find somebody that can point you in the direction of an ideal solution, good luck!
subscribing
subscribing
Partial solution
Sharing some content between two sites is something I need to do myself, but I haven't actually made an attempt to do that yet. I'll think about it a little more tonight and give you some of my ideas. In the meantime I can tell you how to get a central administration for both sites.
If you share the user table and the sessions table you will have the same users on both sites. You can also share other tables that contain data that will be exactly the same on either site. At this point you have two options. You can set up separate lists of roles for each site and assign the roles to the user on each site they should have them for. The other option is to share the role table as well and only assign permissions for certain nodes types to the roles on one of the sites. You have more flexibility with the first method, but both should work for you.
There is something you should know about this to save you some trouble. When you do this the login for the site using the shared tables acts strangely. Thus you will want the primary site to be the trade site and the consumer site would be using the trade site's tables when sharing. All logins would be handled by the trade site. To let the admins access the consumer site, create a link that only shows up for the admins and when they follow the link they will be logged in on the consumer site.
Brutal.
Brutal.
Without actually trying
Without actually trying these things out I can't give much in the way of specifics but you may be able to find a solution based on these ideas.
The best way would be to share the table storing the content which is the nodes table I believe. You would have to add a field to the node types that specifies which sites the content should display in and then add some code to filter out nodes based on that field. I'm not sure what would be the best way of filtering this though. This method would mean you only have to create the content once and no further action would be required.
Another idea is to keep separate content for each site but implement a method of copying the content from one site to the other if it needs to be in both. This would either be something done when the content is submitted, possibly a module designed to forward a copy of the submission to the other site, or it could be a separate step where a link is clicked on to copy the content to the other site.
My final idea would be the simplest to implement, but the most cumbersome to use. You could use an import and export module to export the content from one site and import it into the other. You will have to be sure that the content types you are using are the same for both sites. A module that may suit this purpose is the import / export API. From what I understand the documentation is in the module download and the module code itself.
Hope that gave you what you need. If I come up with something better at a later date I'll drop a message off.
Slight Correction
I just wanted to correct something I said about the login issue I mentioned. The behavior I described only occurs if the different sites use different domain names for the cookies. If you set the settings for each site to use the same domain name then there are no problems with the login working on both sites.
My suggestion
FWIW, check out HOWTO: Segment your site with access control. Once you have the taxonomy controlling things, then you can also apply Taxonomy Theme to alter the look based on which part they are in.
Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in your database
Hi, Use node comments module
Hi,
Use node comments module for this. It should be pretty easy using that, but if still need help then do let me know.
Thanks,
_______________________
UK Deals