By malvim on

Hi!

I'm new to Drupal, but I feel it is a good solution to do what I want, so I'm installing it. Now, I need a little help. :)

I will tell you what I need and where I got since I started, so it's easier to help. I'll try to give all the details.

Well, basically, what I want is this:
- To have some blogs, installed on subdomains of my domain (like blog1.domain.com, blog2.domain.com), etc.
- Each one should have it's own theme and a user (maybe more, but it's ok if it's only one per blog).
- The user should be able to customize his theme/template the way he wants.
- Also, I want to have another subdomain (mainblog.domain.com), which will present the latest posts from all blogs. This one will be maintained by me, and should also have it's own look.

Now, to what I do have:
- I have a shared hosting account, with both cPanel and shell access.
- I can have ftp users for each blog's admin, so they could change their templates and stuff
- I managed to have one installation of drupal and more than one subdomain, by:
- installing drupal on my www root (~/www)
- copying the sites/default/ dir to sites/blog1.domain.com
- editing sites/blog1.domain.com/settings.php to put the right $base_url
- creating a soft link on named ~/www/blog1/ that points to ~/www/

So far, so good, but the sites show the same content. And seems to me it really should be, since it points to the same database and installation. So, I don't know where to go now, and this is where I really need your help.

In order to achieve my goal in a way that is both easy to install and easy to maintain, what should I do?

I have these few ideas, but as I have no experience with Drupal, I can't think of possible problems each one could cause:

- I could have separate databases for each one, but then I wouldn't know how to "aggregate" the content of all blogs in one, and maybe it would be difficult to maintain since I couldn't have a main "ultra-mega-master-admin" account;
- I could keep them on the same database, but then I would have to be able to tell drupal where to go depending on the domain name it came from. Maybe I could get there with mod_rewrite (it is working in my host), but I just don't know if this is a good way to go, and I also don't know HOW to do that. ;) Oh, and maybe this could turn tweaking each blog's template a problem.

Ahhhh, so many doubts!

I hope you can help me, and I thank you guys in advance for your time and attention.

Thanks,
Alvim.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

Sounds to me like you need to set up users for each blog. Since they are seperate installations a new user would have his own blog and be posting from that.

Since it's a shared database I would use the front page module and use a php snippet to display the blog posts of that particular user. Snippet here.

This is how I would do it, but there's probably an easier way with the admin/settings ability to select a specific front page. I've never tried it with a person's particular blog, but it might be possible.

Good luck and hope this helps you find your way.

Edit: You can select a blog to run as a front page. It worked for me when I set mine to "blog/1".
//---------------------------------------
Latenightdesigners.com- Giving IMD a Fighting Chance

z.stolar’s picture

z.stolar commented

Theoreticaly you could use different tables in the shared db, to hold few sites configuration and content, or you could share only part of the tables (for ex. sharing only the users tables), and the instructions to do that are in the installation manual, but it seem to me that this is not the best solution for you.

Let's say that you didn't use subdomains, but only subdirectories. Then you'd have your main page: www.domain.com, and the blogs: www.domain.com/blog/1, www.domain.com/blog/2 etc...
In this case you need not do much - Drupal will do everything for you, automaticaly. It will present those posts with "promoted" on the main page, and show the rest in the individual blogs.
Now - you want to have subdomains instead of subdirectories - to me it seems that using mod_rewrite here is the best solution. Simply redirect blog1.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog/1, and you're done!

The personal design can be then acheived by other means and contributed modules. (I'll ask a friend who did it on a site to comment here about it)

======================
Z.Stolar
http://drupal.org.il
http://dorban.co.il
http://new-spirit.org.il
http://linnovate.net

======================
Z.Stolar
iStolar Consulting
linnovate.net - Open Source Solutions
iStolar illustration

malvim’s picture

malvim commented

Thank you guys for the fast comments. I'll definitely try these tonight as soon as I get home, maybe they'll help me. And I'll come back tomorrow, probably for some more questions. ;)

Cheers,
Alvim.

MrEricSir’s picture

MrEricSir commented

I've been thinking about doing something similar. Ultimately I think using a php-based RSS client for all the sub-sites is the easiest solution. That way you don't have to mess with Drupal for anything but the main site, and you just use the existing feeds.

Of course, this only works if the sub-sites only need a really basic set of features like text and links.