By Flying Drupalist on

In all the handbook pages I've seen so far, multisite has been concerned with using symlink from master to slave. Instead I simply used the cpanel parked domain from slave to the public_html of the master. Would this be correct? Right now it's not working, the theme is not loading despite having the correct base_url.

Can anyone shed some insight or does domain parking simply not work?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

adale’s picture

adale commented

I have used parked domains on many different multisite installations. If the theme is not showing up, be sure to double check your settings. Which directory did you place your template file, and have you selected it to be available? If you placed it in the main theme directory, be sure to select it from your root site first and then make it the default from the parked site.

Dale Dahlgren
Chief Conceptologist
www.linesanddezigns.com
www.head-bone.com
www.imarketingreport.com
www.oldguysonwheels.com

gpk’s picture

gpk commented

If this is indeed a true multisite (i.e. 2 sites sharing the same codebase) rather the same site accessible via 2 URLs, then your theme should be in sites/all/themes in order to make it accessible to both sites.

If you wanted separate themes only available to the site in question you would put them in sites/firstsite.com/themes and sites/secondsite.com/themes, assuming the URLs of your sites are www.firstsite.com and www.secondsite.com.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

Flying Drupalist’s picture

Flying Drupalist commented

"and have you selected it to be available?"

I don't understand this comment. How do I select the theme to be available? I assumed it would be available as soon as I put it in the folder?

Thanks.

alex.b’s picture

alex.b commented

Beside putting theme in the appropriate folder, you also need to enable it and set it to be default: Home/Administer/Site Building/Themes on your second site.

Alexander
ThemeArtists.com

zenetik’s picture

zenetik commented

Glad you mentioned this. I am planning to deploy a multisite configuration but one of the sites will have more than one domain name pointing to it. Is this possible with a multisite configuration (WHM/cPanel-based)?

gpk’s picture

gpk commented

Yes should be OK. For SEO reasons it's best to use your .htaccess to redirect requests for the various domains the site operates under to a single primary domain. However if you want to have the site use whichever domain name the user entered then that's possible too. Just create symlinks in sites/ for the secondary domains pointing to the "primary" domain's folder. And in settings.php make sure you don't specify $base_url. You will probably need shell access, or a PHP command line "emulator" script, or help from your webhost, to create the symlinks. (This is often how I develop a site - using a temporary subdomain URL, and then when it goes live just set up the DNS for the main domain.)

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

Flying Drupalist’s picture

Flying Drupalist commented

It's a true multisite.

It worked absolutely fine in localhost. It's only when I put it on the server that the theme issue crops up.

The theme is

public_html/sites/slave.com/themes/zen/

I've copied the theme everywhere, to sites/all, and the main folder to no avail. Nothing shows up on slave.com.

I've quintuple checked the settings.php now.

$base_url = 'http://slave.com'; // NO trailing slash!

It doesn't work.

gpk’s picture

gpk commented

PHPTemplate themes are identified by the existence of a page.tpl.php file in the theme's folder. is ..../zen/page.tpl.php there? What happens if you copy another theme to ..../sites/slave.com/themes?

Also try putting this into a PHP input format page:

<pre>
<?php
$themes = drupal_system_listing('^page\.tpl\.php$', 'themes', 'filename');
print_r($themes);
?>
</pre>

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_system_listing/5 should scan themes, sites/all/themes, and sites/slave.com/themes to find all the page.tpl.php's.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

edwardspek’s picture

edwardspek commented

Just like Miraploy, I'm trying to install a multisite configuration by using parked domains and I'm having issues as well.

The first problem: when I navigate to the base url of the secondary site I want to install, I get this white-screen error:

Warning: Table 'silward_silward.access' doesn't exist query: SELECT 1 FROM access WHERE type = 'host' AND LOWER('84.123.180.2') LIKE LOWER(mask) AND status = 0 LIMIT 0, 1 in /home/silward/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 128

Warning: Table 'silward_silward.users' doesn't exist query: SELECT u.*, s.* FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.sid = '40dfd8d05a644dae4da6261e56e30f01' in /home/silward/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 128

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/silward/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc:128) in /home/silward/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 976

Warning: Table 'silward_silward.cache' doesn't exist query: SELECT data, created, headers, expire, serialized FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables' in /home/silward/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 128

... etc.

I can bypass this error by navigating directly to the install script (secondarysite.com/install.php); this does load the install page, but again I notice something is not right: the drupal logo image doesn't appear (although if I re-load the page it does sometimes appear momentarily). Strangely, I can view this same logo image URL in another window, but not when it's in the install page!

If I proceed with the installation I eventually experience major issues with the theme, namely that its images don't appear (basically the same problem I saw in the install pages). Am I missing something here?

I'm about to give up on using parked domains and try using symlinks to point them as addon domains to the primary domain.

Can anyone advise before I do?

gpk’s picture

gpk commented

Try setting $base_url in settings.php and/or RewriteBase in .htaccess.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

edwardspek’s picture

edwardspek commented

Thanks for responding, gpk. Here's what I've tried lately:

Instead of creating a parked domain, I set up my secondary site as an "addon domain", deleted its directory, and created a symlink to the root folder with SSH.

Then I uncommented and set the $base_url in the settings.php file, and this time added the port number my host (HostGator) told me to use when connecting with SSH: 2222
e.g. $base_url = 'http://www.secondarysite.com:2222';

I also renamed /sites/secondarysite.com/ to /sites/2222.secondarysite.com/. I know nothing about port numbers or whether 2222 is "non-standard" but decided to try it.

I've tried modifying two of the RewriteBase settings in .htaccess, but neither helped. (Could use some further direction with this, I think)

Anyway, when I now navigate to secondarysite.com it doesn't give that error message anymore, but it loads the primarysite.com homepage instead of the install page (not what I want of course) -- and furthermore the theme (as it appears in secondarysite.com) is again broken (no colours or images).

I can feel I'm getting closer, but not sure how to proceed.

gpk’s picture

gpk commented

To connect to your site's homepage, I don't know what you mean by "connecting with SSH" - do you mean SSL possibly (i.e. https)? In any case I'd suggest getting everything to work using ordinary http:// first of all.

So get rid of the 2222 from $base_url and restore the name of the folder in /sites/.

And undo your changes to .htaccess, and change the final RewriteBase directive:

  # If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
  # uncomment the following line:
  # RewriteBase /

by uncommenting the final line above. The 2 line comment above is not relevant in our case but don't worry about that!

With any luck the installer will then ask you for DB details. The problem you have been having (in part at least) may be that sometimes the Drupal has not matched the URL to the sites/ folder, and so has been using settings.php.

If you still have problems then check your Apache error log - it may show where URL rewrites/redirects are going wrong.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

bardolph’s picture

bardolph commented

I've set up a multisite with a parked domain, and while pages seem to work, all images from the /themes folder generate a 404 error.

I tried copying the themes into the appropriate site folder. This causes all image requests to point to the copy, but still generate a 404 error.

I've updated settings.php to use the base URL, but this does not help.

What can I do?

============

Never mind, I found the solution. I needed to add "RewriteCond" directives into the .htaccess file.

dekalaked’s picture

dekalaked commented

Hi,
I have two domains: mydomain1.com and mydomain2.com.
Drupal code base is in http://www.mydomain2.com/drupal and site folders for 2 domains are setup

This is the cpanel configuration (are all 3 necessary?):
subdomain: /public_html/mydomain1.com - not redirected
parked domain: mydomain1.com - not redirected
redirect: mydomain1.com redirected to http://www.mydomain2.com/drupal

Could you share your cpanel configuration for drupal multi site with cpanel.
Which directives did you add to the .htaccess file?
Thanks