Virtual Site or Multi Site - What would work best for me ?
Hello - I am basically starting from scratch on a web site, and as a Drupal user.
I've got a local Drupal install going for learning on, but I'd like some advice on sites - virtual or multi.
I am working on a site for a community band association (society)
Within the Society are currently 2 bands, and I'd like to have a theme for each.
I'd also like to have a central section for society content that is common, or parent to each band.
I have two domain names registered. I'll use fictional examples below.
bandsociety.ca
band1.ca
"band1" is one of the two bands within the society. The other band ("band2")is not concerned about having a domain name,
so navigating from the main society site is fine with them.
What I'd like is when a person browses to bandsociety.ca, the get the main society site and theme.
When they get to some pages or blogs within the site specific to "band2", I'd like the theme to change.
The same would go for "band1".
Then I'd like users who browse to band1.ca to end up at the page within the main site for the specific "band1", and
of course have it themed to the "band1" theme.
of MAJOR importance, is the fact that I do not want to have separate accounts for any sub site. One account per member
is a requirement. Some users will be members of both bands, and would want to surf back and forth on one account.
Also fans, and non-band member users may want to participate in all three areas.
I've installed Virtual Site (6.x-1.3)
and Conditions. (6.x-2.5)
I've made a couple of test pages, and themes, but can't seem to be able to figure out how to set up a condition
for a page to have it switch the theme for me. Am I on the right track here ?
Thanks
Gerald
Drupal 6.4
MySQL database 5.0.67
Web server Apache/2.2.9 (Win32) PHP/5.2.6
Turned on Path Module.
I had to turn on Path.
Now then I renamed the relative path to page for "band1" then changed the condition to this relative path name.
Now when I go to the page, I get the second theme.
Any further comments on "virtual site" .vs. "multi site" would still be appreciated.
Thanks
Gerald
You were right not to use
You were right not to use the multisites feature, because you can't easily share content between the two sites.
But personally I would have used the 'Domain Access' module instead of 'Virtual Site' for your situation.
Since my local install is
Since my local install is currently 127.0.0.1:8080 - will I be able to effectively test "Domain Access" as such ?
I'm certainly game to give it a go. (Host file perhaps ?)
Can you explain how it will better suit my needs ?
> Since my local install is
> Since my local install is currently 127.0.0.1:8080 - will I be able to effectively
> test "Domain Access" as such ?
I've no idea.
> Can you explain how it will better suit my needs ?
Well, the 'virtual sites' module says it replicates a multi-site set-up.
That means that the sites are effectively separate.
Whereas, 'Domain Access' is for linking affiliated sites together by various degrees.
And basically that's what you got for those two bands.
You'll want:
· some users belonging to both, moving freely between the sites (subdomains).
· some users restricted to the subdomain that they're a member of.
· some content on one or the other site, but some content shared between both.
· some authors who can post content to one or the other site, or to shared on both sites.
· some authors who can only post content on the site they're a member of.
Domain Access can do all that I think, whereas virtual site and multi-site can't.
> Well, the 'virtual sites'
> Well, the 'virtual sites' module says it replicates a multi-site set-up.
> That means that the sites are effectively separate.
As far as I can see, the virtual sites module does not replicate a multi-site setup. eg. it does not allow a separate admin area, it does not allow separate menus (just shared ones). It's just a way of saying "if the path looks like x, use theme y".
You can make 'separate' content by typing in the path manually when you create it, but it's only separate in that the theme will be different. You can't have a separate primary-links menu for the virtual site, and restrict content creation in it to particular users because content creation is done in the main site. Even more confusingly, when I tried editing content in the virtual site the edit page jumped back to the main site's theme.
Can someone please correct me if I'm wrong in thinking this, because the virtual sites module looked really useful at first glance but now looks less so. Maybe I've misunderstood something.
> As far as I can see, the
> As far as I can see, the virtual sites module does not replicate a multi-site setup.
> eg. it does not allow a separate admin area
Thanks for the heads-up. Your explanation of it is far clearer than the project page, which is what I based my original advice on. Apologies for the misinformation.
FYI, since posting in this thread I tried the Domain Access module, and can't recommend that either. It's a bit of a monster, so it confuses and complicates, and I think it can cause many conflicts and errors with other modules.
If the problem is to give a visual indication of what 'section' the user is in, my current approach for that is to use clearly styled menu highlighting (menutrails module is needed to fix core menu behaviour), and place a 'section' graphic in the header banner based on url wildcard condition (handled by the core blocks). I'm going to try to use that for five or six 'departments' within our organisation.
I also need a couple of more 'separated' sites, and for those I'm going to go the whole hog and use the core multi-site feature; it means much more work setting them up and maintaining them separately, but I don't think the current 'half-separated' solutions are completely workable.
Cheers.
Interesting points made ..
I would like to see some sort of conclusion to this conversation.
You put
I'm going to go the whole hog and use the core multi-site feature; it means much more work setting them up and maintaining them separately, but I don't think the current 'half-separated' solutions are completely workable.
How did this work out for you? Did any of you get any thing working with the modules?
I am doing something similar and some conclusions would be a great help for me and any other user who reads this post.
Thanks guys.
In the end, I didn't even use
In the end, I didn't even use multisites.
I used completely separate sites for each 'branch' of our organisation.
This was because I read so many problems in the forums about multisites clashing with modules.
I started off thinking Drupal could handle one large company website, with four main branches and several departments in each branch. But I met barriers (bugs, design flaws, incompatibilities, and functional limitations) every single step of the way, and I *mean* every single step. Like trying to hack your way through a deep forest one way, but then having to continuously stop and go back the way you've just come to try another route through.
Now I would only attempt to build small, very simple sites from Drupal; I WOULDN'T do anything that:
· required more than fifteen modules (which barely brings drupal up to basic functionality)
· was multilingual in anyway whatsoever
· required clearly defined 'sections' (eg. departments in an organisation)
· relied on anything but the simplest taxonomy structure - less than a dozen terms in any vocab
· needed more than a couple of the simplest menus for navigation
· needed a wysiwyg editor that actually dovetailed into content creation process, to allow easy insertion of images, sound or video, and file management.
Knowing what I know now, I've actually seen bigger, more complex sites in cmsmadesimple and websitebaker than I'd try to attempt with Drupal. The conclusion to this thread is that drupal is pants, and I can't believe I've wasted so much time on it. Unfortunately I'm tied into it for three existing sites still in development. But after they're done, I'm done with Drupal if I can possibly avoid using it. I don't know what the alternative is, but there must be something better than this HELL.