Multisite, DomainAccess, or something else?
I hate to ask another question regarding this topic, but my newbie-ness has prevented me from applying similar situations to mine. In short, I am trying to determine the best way to setup a network of blogs on subdomains with my present hosting environment. I've outlined my situation below, followed by my specific questions. Thanks in advance for your help.
I. My Hosting Environment
.....A. Shared host (HostPC to be exact) with DirectAdmin on Apache servers
.....B. No shell access and just one database (I went cheap here)
.....C. DirectAdmin features the ability to create subdomains and has a "DNS Management" option
II. Concept I am trying to achieve
.....A. A network of blogs on subdomains.
..........1. Each blog will have the same layout (modules, theme structure), but different colors and headers.
..........2. I (for now) will be the sole author of content on each blog.
..........3. Users, with one registration, can comment on blog posts on each different site.
..........4. AT MINIMUM, blog posts on each subdomain will ALL appear on the main page.
..........5. IDEALLY, I will be able to have the ability to post to select subdomains
.....B. Detailed structure
..........1. The main site will be www.qweblogs.com which will feature content from ALL of the subdomains.
..........2. For purposes of discussion, the subdomains will be:
...............a. test.qweblogs.com
...............b. test2.qweblogs.com
...............c. test3.qweblogs.com
III. My Thoughts
.....A. The Domain Access module sounds like the best option to me.
..........1. However, it is noted that it may not work in shared host situations.
..........2. I have indeed tried installing it hoping that it might work (more on that later), but my attempt to bring test.qweblogs.com to life did not work (http://test.qweblogs.com/ is not responding and may not be configured correctly at the server level. Server code 403 was returned.)
.....B. With regards to the above, I am clueless when it comes to this DNS stuff.
.....C. I really don't understand the Multisite installation and whether or not that is something I need to worry about if I am going to try Domain Access.
IV. What I tried
.....A. I created the test.qweblogs.com subdomain in DirectAdmin
.....B. I tried to understand the DNS settings in the INSTALL.txt of Domain Access, but I don't get them at all really. I looked under the "DNS Management" page in DirectAdmin and all of the IP address values were the same for all of the domain and subdomain options.
.....C. Considering 'B' above, I decided to enable the module and see if by chance it worked.
.....D. Everything seems in working order except, creating test.qweblogs.com did not result in the creation of anything but an error message on the "Edit domain record" page saying: http://test.qweblogs.com/ is not responding and may not be configured correctly at the server level. Server code 403 was returned.
.....E. The error message when typing test.qweblogs.com into the address bar reads:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2 Server at test.qweblogs.com Port 80
V. Questions
.....A. Does anyone have first-hand experience with identical/almost similar hosting situations trying to achieve what I am going for? I think my DNS ignorance is the problem since something is wrong server wise, but . . .
.....B. Is Domain Access really the best option for me? Or is it even possible for me to use it in my hosting environment?
.....C. Considering 'B' above, is the core multisite setup or something like Organic Groups, etc. something I should be looking into?
.....D. Is Drupal even the best option or should I be looking at something more blog specific like Wordpress? Personally, I want to use Drupal since I am *somewhat* familiar with it from a little project a couple years ago and I like the flexibility it features to add new stuff as I learn more.
Please let me know if there is any other information that I can provide to help you help me! Thanks.
Bump.
Bump.
I'm working on almost exactly
I'm working on almost exactly the same thing.
What you need to do is have a wildcard DNS record pointing at your domain. In other words, you need to have something in there redirecting *.qweblogs.com to your shared server's IP address. And then you need to have an entry in your Apache config file saying that any requests for *.qweblogs.com should be directed to qweblogs.com. And then you need to have a module in Apache that's configured properly...
It'll work like this: Someone requests test1.qweblogs.com -- so the request is sent to the DNS server for translation. The DNS server says, "OK, that's at 124.242.123.65" (or whatever), so your browser contacts that server. Apache says "OK, all requests for subdomains of qweblogs.com go to qweblogs.com, so just return qweblogs.com." Then control is handed off to Drupal, who is told that you requested "test1."
Here's where I actually answer your initial question:
The multisite configuration is AFAIK not intended for things like what you and I want. If you get it working properly (which would be extremely irritating without shell access), you still have to add and subtract domains (and their data!) manually. It's a pain. If you want to share users, you are entering into dangerous and not recommended territory, and you will almost certainly be hacking around repeatedly. Not fun. Not recommended.
The Domain module is, I think, the way to go. You can add and remove domains very easily, through Drupal rather than through a shell interface or worse, and it handles itself.
But really: Dude, try Wordpress-MU. Drupal is really awesome, elegant, and incredibly powerful, but it's frankly overkill (and too much pain and effort) just for hypergraphic people like us who need a fleet of blogs :P Wordpress-MU is pretty hardcore in its own rights, although I don't think it's as clever as Drupal (and it's certainly not made to be as ridiculously extensible as Drupal). Wordpress-MU's multi-domain setup is basically bulletproof, as far as I can tell. You need to spam-proof it very carefully since Wordpress is basically the biggest target out there, but, whatever.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the input.
Thanks for the input. Actually while researching WordPressMU, the light finally came on for the wildcard DNS stuff. I put a request in with my host to get that setup, so (fingers crossed) I might be able to get Domain Access working and play with that.
I agree that Drupal is probably overkill for what I am doing. I used it a couple years ago when I had a site that really used the taxonomy features, so my relative familiarity with it is why I returned. This is just a evening/weekend hobby for me now, so I'd like like to stick with Drupal and continue to learn about it's features and see what I can do. I'd rather spend time now learning an overkill system than spend time later regretting a decision to work with an easier, but potentially more confining system.
Can't blame you. I ended up
Can't blame you. I ended up sticking with Drupal too primarily because of the available modules. I had a couple posts that I was using for test purposes, and I wrote them on Drupal... and copied and pasted the content to a Wordpress-MU installation. It bummed me out because even though these posts used fairly minor modules (urlicon, footnotes, interwiki), there were no good equivalents for Wordpress-MU that offered the same functionality.
So I thought, "screw it." Even though Drupal is overkill and it's more difficult to make a really foxy Drupal site, I do think the benefits of Drupal more than outweigh its shortcomings as compared to even such a project as Wordpress-MU.
I was planning to have same
I thought It would be confusing for users to have their own subdomains. They better see their own content after they login to main page. Now, I am dealing with content access modules. So I recommend instead of user.qweblogs.com ,your users can just login to your site then see their node (blog).
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