Site Planning advice needed: sites with diff. users and diff content but similar theme and modules installed

Posted by mirrie on June 25, 2009 at 8:58am

I am a novice and need some advice to potentially save a ton of time in the future:
a dance studio that has dependencies in two countries with separate domains ( .ch and .de) . It needs a website that has basically the same functionality but different users and different content. (the sites would be hosted on the same server under the same account). The theme could be the same yet use different logo and backgroundimages. The content that needs to be shared can be neglected.

For the least trouble ahead in the future with maintaining the site, what would be best practice in a case like this and what are the documentations that should I read up on? Thanks in advance

Comments

Hi, This is quite easily

Posted by johngriffin on June 25, 2009 at 3:24pm

Hi,

This is quite easily achieved using Drupal's multi-site functionality.

Multi-site allows you to share users and content but since you don't want to do that it's even easier. You will end up with two complete sets of Drupal tables in your database, each prefixed with the site they pertain to. You can share certain modules by placing them in sites/all/modules and then keep some separate by placing them in either sites/mysite.de/modules or sites/mysite.ch/modules.

There is quite a lot of documentation for setting up multi-site available here:

http://drupal.org/node/43816

It's for Drupal 5, but as far as I can remember there's no difference in setting it up for D6.

You say that themes will be similar but not identical, sounds like Drupal's theme inheritance will help you out there, so that you can create your base theme then override certain bits for each site. Themes which inherit from another theme are referred to as sub-themes, the Zen theme is a good example to study to see how this is done. There is also some good official Drupal documentation on sub-themes at:

http://drupal.org/node/225125

John Griffin
Atchai Digital

sites/FOO/modules
sites/FOO/themes

and move your current settings.php file (from sites/default/settings.php) to sites/FOO/

Then you will need to create a new directory for your new site, let's call it BAR, so:

sites/BAR/

which has themes and modules subdirectories as well as a settings.php file but this time with a db_prefix for the new site.

John Griffin
Atchai Digital

Site Planning advice needed: sites with diff. users and diff content but similar theme and modules installed

Comments

Hi, This is quite easily

sounds good. Can this also be

turn existing site into multisite install.

Yes