By luckyday13 on

Hello,

First let me say I am very new to Drupal, but so far I am very impressed. I have managed to install a single drupal site and install/configure a number of modules and themes. Moving forward, I have two real questions. First I would like to confirm my planned approach for my companies website (small environmental consulting firm). Second, I am having some difficulty getting my multisite configuration of drupal to work. I have read many forum posts and I think I am close, but I must be missing something very simple.

1. My goal is to have the following set-up:

corporatesite.com
project1.corporatesite.com
project2.corporatesite.com

The corporate site will be just that, for now some basic corporate brochure type of content. Project subdomains 1 & 2 represent individual project sites that will be used to coordinate files and communicate with clients (restricted access to content by clients and team members) . My original thinking was that setting up subdomains was the way to go, creating unique databases for each of the projects and repeating the step for all future projects. However, the more I have read, the more I realize I may be able to achieve unique content and user managment using Drupal's categories, taxonomy, and views with proper planning. Alternatively, maybe a combination of implementing multisite subdomains and the right categories is the best approach for keeping project data separate. I would love to know what people think of this or other options available. One other consideration is that on many projects, there will be a number of overlapping users who I would like to maintain the same access across projects, so I would like to avoid having such users create multiple accounts.

2. Multisite - symlinks
Based on various posts, I have created two subdomains using my cpanel as well as created two new databases. I then copied the default settings.php from /sites/all/ and created two new directories, pasting the settings.php in twice. I updated the database and user access in the settings.php based on the respective databases I created and changed the read/write directory access to 777 for these directories and also for the root directory where drupal is installed. Using SSH access, I then attempted to create the symlinks enter the following:

cd ~/public_html
rm -Rf ./project1
rm -Rf ./project2
ln -s ./drupalroot ./project1
ln -s ./drupalroot ./project2
ls -la

It appears the symlinks have been created, but when I click on project1.corporatesite.com, nothing is found. Any thoughts on errors would be greatly appreciated. I have tried countless variations, but I am not having much luck. Clearly I am missing something.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.
Rob
p.s. Regardless of the advice for question 1, I will still need to resolve question 2, if not for the "project sub domians" but another subdomain we will need to add in the short future.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x