Multiple Drupal instances?
I'm currently planning a large website network that needs to go up fast, and I've heard great things about Drupal as a CMS. Originally planning to build a proprietary system from scratch, I just don't have the time, funds, or experience to do so at this time. I need to know if it's possible (and how) to run multiple drupal instances that share a database. Specifically, each site will be a separate subdomain of the larger "hub" site (i.e. site1.hubsite.com), have its own content and theme, but users are shared among them. The "hub" site will aggregate news from each of the network sites, while also having its own content and theme (but still the same users). Is there a way to configure a setup like this using one install of drupal with one database, with one management interface (all on the same server)?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
Also to note...
It's probably also important to note that each of the network sites will have its own staff that have privileges pertaining only to their site, while there will also be a few global staff, who have the rights to manage all content on the network.
Its possible, but..
Your requirement can be fulfilled by multisite concept, but as you mentioned "single interface to manage them all", I have to say that you got different interface. All other requirements can be fulfilled by the multisite concept.
Feel free to ask if you have any doubt about.
Beautifulmind
Know more
There are currently two
There are currently two different methods. The first is drupal's own multisite functionality:
> each site will be a separate subdomain of the larger "hub" site (i.e. site1.hubsite.com), have its own content and theme, but users are shared among them
Yes, no problem.
But each user has to still log-in to each site (ie. shared user accounts is not the same as shared, single log-in)
> The "hub" site will aggregate news from each of the network sites
Not in the sense of a user choosing to publish on site1.domain.com and domain,dom. The sites are separate in that respect. However, you could probably set-up rss aggregation so that some content is automatically shared by rss feed amongst the sites. I think it could be based on taxonomy term ('tagging').
To be honest, multisites doesn't sound like what you're looking for, so the second method to look at would be the domain access module: http://drupal.org/project/domain
Using multisite you can
Using multisite you can achieve some level of centralization like, prefixing some of the tables in setting.php and thus content tables can be unique for each "hub".
Now the users have to access different "hub" interfaces to log in, they are shared by all the "hubs", though.
And if you want to share the content too, do not prefix those tables.
About news aggregation, I think its not a big deal to implement.
Beautifulmind
Know more
> Using multisite you can
> Using multisite you can achieve some level of centralization
True, but centralisation goes against the intended usage of multisite functionality.
Its main intention is to provide completely different websites using one shared code-base.
The functionality to share database tables was borne from the limitation that some hosts
only allow one database on user accounts, and it also allows a shared user-base between
related websites. But it wasn't really supposed to provide a way to 'link' the content.
However, the purpose of the domain access module is to actually share selected
content between subdomain sites, as well as present content based on subdomain,
and restrict users to publishing on their assigned subdomains. It's all centralised,
and is all contained in one, unprefixed database.
Domain Access just sounds like a much better starting point to me.