By dustonio on

I have spent the past three days reading through forums and trying different things, and I'm completely confused. I'm running Cpanel on a dedicated server and do have root access, however I'm not very literate when it comes to doing SSH and things at the command prompt. I will use a separate MySQL database for each site in a multisite installation, but would like to manage only a single Drupal core.

I used Fantastico to set up the Drupal installation, which put it in the following location by default:
on the server: /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal
on the web: http://mymainsite.com/drupal

I have created the below directory structure for the two sites I'd like to build in Drupal.
on the server: /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/site/www.mysite1.com
on the server: /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/site/www.mysite2.com

Of course I still have the original directory structure in place:
on the server: /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/site/all
on the server: /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/site/default

Question (1): How should the domains be added in Cpanel?
How should I add each domain name (e.g. www.mysite1.com) to my Cpanel account so that I can run its respective Drupal site at: http://www.mysite1.com and not http://www.mysite1.com/drupal?
I wasn't sure if I click on "Add On Domain", "Parked Domain", "Subdomain", or "Redirect".

Question (2): Additional configuring necessary?
And reading through many of the posts, it seems that I am required to set up a way to dynamically link each domain name to the drupal directory by changing an .htaccess somewhere or creating a symlink.

Is the purpose of this linking (either through .htaccess or symlink) simply a way to allow a web site to be visited at http://mysite1.com/ but instead the structure at http://mysite.com/drupal? In other words, making the URL work without displaying the "drupal" name?

Question (3): How does Drupal know that the installation should handle multiple domains?
By adding a URL-esque directory in the /drupal/sites/ folder, is this enough information to set-up a new site as part of the multisite installation? Apart from that, I guess the only change needs to take place is a modification of the new site's settings.php file, correct?

Is it true then that I just leave /sites/default/settings.php alone and do not change it?

Thanks for any help.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

peterx’s picture

peterx commented

It might be a typo in your post. Should be sites, not site.
/home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/site/www.mysite1.com -> /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/sites/www.mysite1.com

I install Drupal in the home directory as /home/dustonio/public_html/
instead of /home/dustonio/public_html/drupal/
Does Fantastico give you that option? It may be easier to install youself if you cannot get Fantastico to do what you want.

I park the additional domains. Parking is the same as adding on and without the option to change the directory.

.htaccess can make /drupal/ look like / and you can avoid the problem by installing direct into /.

Drupal searches for the settings file for the specific domain first then settles for the default. See http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install/multi-site

petermoulding.com/web_architect

petermoulding.com/web_architect

dustonio’s picture

dustonio commented

Hi peterx! Thanks for your advice. Yes, you are correct; it is a typo -- it should be /sites/ not /site/ as I incorrectly wrote above.

Based on the "getting started" link you posted, it appears as though I should not use the prefix of "www." for the domain names under /public_html/drupal/sites/.

And I'll see about moving the directory structure from /public_html/drupal/ to /public_html/. Unfortunately there was not a setting for me to do so within Fantastico -- at least not one that I could find out.