By fresh-off on

Hello,
I’ve got a passive income idea in which I’d have users from a particular niche come to my website, sign up for an account and pay for a service which lets them choose from certain pre-designed templates, and get their own “pre-packaged” Drupal site. How do I do that? I know that’s a rather BIG question, but I’m not even sure what terms to start searching for!

I do know how to create the basic functionality of the templated/prepackaged sites I want my users to choose from (i.e. a blog, picture gallery, email list, and several designs/themes), and I understand there is a ecommerce module that allows for subscription based payments – but I don’t know “offer” those pre-packaged sites to users? That is, how does the user go from signing up for the service and choosing a prepackaged site to actually getting access to one of the prepackaged sites? How can those sites be set up automatically after the user has paid a fee and chosen a template?

I also have questions about the domains associated with these sites as I’d like to offer my users two choices: a subdomain from my site – or the ability to use a custom domain.

So, I guess I have three questions:

  1. How do I set up “pre-packaged” Drupal sites for my users to access?
  2. Where can in find out information about domains, subdomains and hosting for these pre-packaged sites?
  3. And most importantly - in my Drupal/Google searches, what sorts of terms should I search for to get questions 1 and 2 answered?? Where do I begin?

I know what I want to do, just don’t really know where to start looking! Any help would be appreciated! And FYI, my PHP and MySQL skills are currently pretty light, but I suspect I’ll probably need to get my hands rather dirty to pull this off!!

Thanks!!!

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

part of what you are asking sounds alot like installation profiles which drupal core is capable of and drupal.org already distributes freely.

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icouto’s picture

icouto commented

Hi there, fresh-off. I'm also a Drupal newbie, but I've been doing *a lot* of reading, and from the information I've come across, I would dare say, that there are probably several different ways to achieve what you want.

I would suggest you have a look at the "Demo Site (Sandbox)" module, as this can be a good starting point for setting up several different types of 'predefined', fully-configured sites:

http://drupal.org/project/demo

There are also some modules, if I'm not mistaken, that help you produce full backups of a working site, and others that allow you to deploy a site from a CVS repository. These may or may not provide possible alternate solutions, too.

sentient1’s picture

sentient1 commented

I too have been looking for a few examples of full sites that were built using Drupal's best practices.
I want to make sure when I start developing sites in drupal that the taxonomy, menu, and so on are all
being used in the most efficient way.

I've worked on with a many in-house Content Management Systems, developing websites and adding
functionality. Those systems never took advantage of a taxonomy in the site building, and I am hoping
to find examples where that is used efficiently.

Thanks in advance.