By arcane on

My project calls for having a media site with content for movies, music, etc. We would like to have one main site that has all of the different content and then subsites that show only the particular category of content.

So for example,

main.example.com would show all content
music.example.com would show all music related content
movies.example.com would show all movie related content

Also, each subsite would have its own theme and blocks and rss feeds.

Can anyone advise the best way of implementing this scenario. I was thinking of coming up with a tagging scenario to handle this, and then wondered can Drupal's multi-site capability work in this scenario. What possible problems could I run into? Do I need 1 database or mulitple? Is there a way to do this with Mod-ReWrites?

Any help would be appreciated.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

ericg’s picture

ericg commented

We are working on a similar project where

site.url is the main admin site with all content and
site1.url
site2.url
site3.url are all different sites with some shared content

we use a taxonomy in the main admin site that allows for selecting one or many of the sites to show the content on

there are two ways of handling it, that we are testing to see which is best.

one is a simple modification to the node.module so that it looks at the url of the site and based on that only displays nodes that are tagged with that sitename; the other is a modification to the templates that does the same.

you can set each subsite for it's own theme, and since the way that blocks work in 4.7 gives each theme its own block settings, the rest is just core

I have not yet looked into how each of these options effects rss feeds.

Gman’s picture

Gman commented

Yes this is possible with a multi-site install, and creative use of table sharing. I had a similar setup that went like this.

Create the vocabulary that will segregate your content. Then use the taxonomy access module to give control of each section to various people (if you are doing all the admin yourself, you can possibly skip this part).

Then you have to go through and setup each subsite, but making sure that you make distinct tables for all the parts that you want different for each site (blocks, boxes, aggregator) and place the seperate themes in the sites folders.

You should be able to place it all in one database. I then used the taxonomy_breadcrumb module so I could link back to main subdomains instead of the taxonomy pages. Also, look into the Views modules to also help setup each subdomain's main page to only include content for that particular section.

It takes a bit of work, but I think it is worth it considering that the search ability is sitewide when you share the node table, and upgrades will be much easier since you are only using one code base.

I am hoping to go live on my site in a few weeks (or a month), and I will have a full write up of my senario then (too busy just getting it to work and adding the material to write it up now). -Gman