By head-geek on
Howdy
We have an existing site setup for our school district at www.bsd-ri.net. What I'd like to do next is setup individual sites for each school within the district using subdomains, e.g. highschool.bsd-ri.net, elementary.bsd-ri.net, etc.
I have no trouble setting up Drupal multi-sites and setting up Apache virtual hosts on a clean box to achieve this type of setup. My concern is that I want to do this on my existing server that is currently serving just the one Drupal site at www.bsd-ri.net. I'm afraid that if I try and setup virtual hosts and multi-site "after the fact" that I'm going to blow up the existing site, specifically with paths like /parents/h1n1
Any suggestions before I start digging into this?
Thanks
Paul
Comments
Should not be a big problem....
On our servers we simply do the following:
1. For the existing (base) site, it's best (but not strictly required) to have its settings.php and files within the /sites/basesite.com directory.
2. For each add-on, create a directory like /sites/elementary.basesite.com or /sites/reformschool.basesite.com. Each will have its own settings.php file, files directory, and, optionally, themes, libraries etc.
3. It's best to rename the /sites/default directory to something else, so as to avoid errors.
Now. create a virtual server, point it to the SAME SPOT as your base site, and drupal will sort out what site is being asked for.
That's how it works on the four servers I am playing on, and it's been no problem.
Now, I don't share content among any of these sites, so if that is your goal, I am totally ignorant, though I have seen discussions on that point.
Good luck
:)
Coming from an Enterprise
Coming from an Enterprise background myself, i would recommend doing this during a scheduled outage and during off peak hours so and ensure that all stakeholders are aware of this period. our organization has outages each month that allow us to schedule this kind of work.
^ good advice ^
Just in case something goes wrong!
:)