By jdcllns on

I'm having trouble figuring out how multisite works.

Let's say my main site is www.mysite.com.

I want to use city names as subdomains:

huntsville.mysite.com, dallas.mysite.com, newyork.mysite.com

I need to allow local experts to post content to their particular city sites. I need to be able to admin everything from the main site.

I'm want fixed categories in each city site, such as Food, Entertainment, Hotels...

I'd like to run this off a single drupal install with on database.

I've searched all over drupal.org and read stuff about multisite, taxonomies, views, clean urls and aliases. I'm more confused than ever. Would someone be so kind as to give me advice on which direction to take to get started?

Thanx
DC

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Taxonomies, views, clean urls and aliases have nothing to do with it.

Basic multisite is quite simple. Multisite lets you serve multiple websites out of a common set of PHP files. That's ALL it's intended to do.

Drupal takes note of the domain that was requested and reads the corresponding settings.php file, which is normally located in /sites/huntsville.mysite.com/settings.php, sites/dallas.mysite.com/settings.php, et cetera.

Multiple sites can share a common database by using table prefixes.

It gets dicey when you complicate the requirements by stating a desire to "admin everything from the main site."

To support Skirt.com, Morris DigitalWorks created a module known as Domain Access. This supports www.skirt.com, augusta.skirt.com, boston,skirt.com, et cetera.

Editors from each of those sites have controlled administrative access to their own content, but they can't get into other markets' business. Superadministrators have global access.

jdcllns’s picture

jdcllns commented

yelvington - Thanx for your reply.

I kept looking around and found this article:

How to: Multi-site with Views, all tables shared
http://drupal.org/node/131036

I think this has potential to get me going in the right direction. I'll just need to figure out how to compartmentalize the individual city site info and tie it to a specific user.

It's interesting to me that Drupal doesn't already have a way to handle associated sites. I have two up coming projects that need to work this way; a main site handled from the corporate office and subsites handled from the local offices.

Dean Collins

jdcllns

edward.peters’s picture

edward.peters commented

I have been researching this same issue for many weeks now, and thought that the Domain Access solution was best. But we have found another, maybe cleaner way, based on Taxonomy Access. It gives more fine grained control than other solutions, but not such tidy administrative interfaces. I can share more with you if you are interested.

jdcllns’s picture

jdcllns commented

I've been tinkering around with Domain Access, Multidomain, Multisite Manager and Single Signon. That combination seems to do what I need. Someone also suggested that I try Organic Groups (http://drupal.org/node/197491). But I'm always interested in other suggestions.

Dean Collins

jdcllns