Should I combine my Drupal sites or not?

By dailypress on 22 Oct 2009 at 18:59 UTC

Should I combine two of my websites that look very similar in design and function? They both use the same theme with different CSS. I think both pretty much use the same modules as well.

I) If so, is there any good document I can read before doing so?
II) Do you recommend doing so? Do you recommend doing so considering that Drupal 7 is coming out and I wont have to update modules manually?
III) The Pros and Cons in combing 2 drupal sites?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

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vsr commented 22 October 2009 at 20:00

If you are going to combine into one drupal site, a few questions.

Why do you want to combine them?

Would the topics be best handled by one or two sites?

Do you want to lose the SEO opportunity of having 2 sites?

Do you want to put all your eggs in one basket?

Can you market a broader based site as well as two niche sites?

Do any of the modules confict? They might work on one site, but when two sites are combines they might conflict.

Do you ave enough resources to handle a combined site? Will you need a better hosting plan?

thanks for your response. I

dailypress commented 22 October 2009 at 20:51

thanks for your response. I think there was a miscommunication. I meant to run 2 seperate domains/websites, while sharing the core files of drupal and modules.

I remember reading somewhere that you can manage multiple websites using one installation of Drupal.

Im not sure how it works but think you install Drupal once, then configure different settings and different themes and modules (under the site folder, for example site/modules/website1 and site/modules/website2) or something like that.

the main reason why I would like to do that is so I dont have to upload modules twice. Especially when I have to update the modules it becomes a pain because I have installed many of them on both sites!

On the other hand I heard Drupal 7 is trying to eliminate the webmaster task and will update modules automatically so im wondering if I should go through the pain of configuring two seperate sites and sharing core files under one installation! ?