Greetings,
I've seen a significant amount of information on configuring multisites in regards to user access, but nothing so far on sharing other types of data, particularly data from custom content types. I assume the solution I'm looking for has something to do with db prefixes but I'm not sure. What I'm trying to accomplish is pretty straight-forward. I have a "main" site and a number of "client" sites; more specifically, websites for recruiters with functionality specific to recruiting processes. So I have the master site (a demo) that has all of the required functionality. This functionality is of course shared across all multisites. Depending on the plan the client chooses, I go into their site and disable or enable modules, content types etc.
What I want to do is aggregate several content types data from all sites on the demo site. I want to aggregate jobs and blogs (custom content types I have defined) in one shared db. This way, users (for example candidates) can arrive at the main site and search jobs from all affiliate recruiters or read blogs.
My question is this... if I define the job and blogs data tables to point to the master db in the settings.php file of all recruiter sites, will recruiter sites only display their own blogs and jobs or will they display all blogs and jobs from the master db? I'm looking for a "one-way" solution where the master site db collects all the data and can use it for whatever purposes but the client (recruiter) db has access and displays only the content they created.
Furthermore, how would I prefix a db for content type tables? I would need only the data, not the configuration. I appreciate any advice. many thanks. Kevin
Comments
All the client sites that
All the client sites that create content expose rss feeds that the main one imports with feeds?
I thought about this but it
I thought about this but it is not practical because each site has an independent feed and I would have to aggregate feeds from many different recruiter sites. Furthermore, the search would not be as powerful as fine-tuned as a feed does not give me all of the variables (e.g., cck fields) to filter results by.
easier solution?
(Scratch this, spoke to soon)
Multi-site and/or database sharing/altering seems a bit complex a solution for this need.
Since you are only concerned about sharing content between sites, could you not just have the sites pickup on each others feeds and import/aggregate?
I don't have a lot of experience importing feeds, but I'm sure that can be done... Let me know, I'm heading down the Multi-site road (for different reasons) at full speed.
cheers,
Really what you want is the
Really what you want is the Domain Access module. http://drupal.org/project/domain This lets you set node access per domain, so a given node might show up on one site but not another, or both, depending.
Another option would be to have the various domains share the same database, but use taxonomy or some other form of tagging, plus Views to sort out which content is appropriate per domain.
I investigated domain but it
I investigated domain but it is not the right solution for me because it is not possible to customize the module configuration of each recruiter site. From what I understand Domain is great for sharing content but not if you need to replicate site configurations and then tweak them at a very granular level.
My guess is the recruiter sites need their own databases for most of their content with the data from a couple tables held in the master database which can then be leveraged in many ways by the main site.