how to create a mini site inside the main site???

Posted by sgalindo88 on August 15, 2011 at 8:18pm

I am trying to setup a site that would have a file structure similar to the one used in http://www.poss.ca/en/
where I have my main domain and then sub folders for different sections of the site (ex. maindoimain.com/mainlink/section1/news and maindomain.com/mainlink/section2/news.
Do you of any place/website/blog anything really that might have some kind of tutorial of how to accomplish this?
The problem that I am having is that there is a regular site with the normal content and navigation and all that but then when you click on one of the pages, it displays another "mini" website instead of regular content.
This "mini" site has its own navigation, blocks and content. All of this is displayed within the main content of the page. The navigation for this "mini" site would be the sections on the url example i provided earlier.

Any suggestions on what is the best way to develop this??

Comments

double post apologies

Posted by patrickavella on August 15, 2011 at 9:32pm

double post apologies everyone.

Multi site is probably over kill for small static mini sites.

Posted by patrickavella on August 15, 2011 at 9:31pm

I don't really know much about your situation, but I've dealt with a similar arrangement in the past.

Drupal does allow multisites to be configured on a per path basis but I've never been able to get that working properly. A better solution for you, I'd think, is to develop your mini sites within your current installation. You can use the theming and block system to completely theme a subpage/subsite to look nothing like the main site while still keeping all of the content in the same work flow.

In the end, I think this is a job for theming more than it is modding or installing extra multi sites, but I don't know the full details of your situation and can only guess with my opinions. If these mini sites are really that small (like a landing site of four or five pages) I'd say theming the sub .tpl files is your best option.

Would Pathauto

Posted by Lakeside on August 16, 2011 at 2:26am

Would Pathauto (http://drupal.org/project/pathauto) be a solution?

There's also a list of suggest modules on the page.

You might also buid your site

Posted by rpsu on August 16, 2011 at 6:52am

You might also buid your site using

either content types (one per minisite) or
using taxonomy (term per minisite),
set up pathauto to create appropriate paths for each of them (for example www.example.com/[term 1]/news),
set up menu's for each minisite and
edit each menu-block to be visible only within certain minisite based on path

I've used this method in a couple of sites to create sections, seems to do the work for me pretty well.

Block visibility using PHP: http://drupal.org/node/134425, and there's also Block node visibility -module.

--
Perttu Ehn

Sorry I should have clarified

Posted by sgalindo88 on August 19, 2011 at 8:07pm

Sorry I should have clarified a little bit more the scope of the "minisites"

the problem is that the mini site is not really static. It has its own navigation and content(which at the same time is shared with the main site). the entire minisite is supposed to be displayed within the "main content" of one of the primary link's pages. something like this screen1 & screen2

So my problem really is creating the navigation and the pages for each mini site in a way that when the people managing it want to add a new "minisite" they don't have to go through the whole process of creating views and blocks and content types for each "minisite". They want something like a page template where they can just input the information and that's it.

I tried the taxonomies but I don't really know how they are supposed to work. I also tried the subsite module but there is not much documentation for it, so i had no clue how to use it.

any more help i would really appreciate it..

thanks..

Look at this module

Posted by Ole Martin on August 16, 2011 at 2:15pm

Look at this module http://drupal.org/project/context, http://drupal.org/project/panels or http://drupal.org/project/og

Finally figured out that the

Posted by sgalindo88 on August 19, 2011 at 8:05pm

Finally figured out that the best way to do that was to use the Organic Groups module http://drupal.org/project/og

Thanks for the suggestions..

Sgalindo88, Thanks for

Posted by Lakeside on August 19, 2011 at 10:02pm

Sgalindo88,

Thanks for figuring that out for the rest of us.

Glad you found a solution

Posted by Ole Martin on August 19, 2011 at 10:19pm

Glad you found a solution that you want. I'm working on a site that will have many (10 - 15) mini-site inside a larger solution. I also considered Organic Groups for a while (I know OG from earlier), but will use Panels this time. And Organic Groups and Panels may well be used together.

Tell us later how you finally solved this.

Basically all I did was

Posted by sgalindo88 on August 21, 2011 at 9:09pm

Basically all I did was create a group for every page in the "minisite", in my case i have 5 page so i created 5 groups. Then I created blocks using views for the content that I needed to display in each page and created custom nodes to display the blocks. It sounds kind of complicated and im sure there is an easier way of doing this but it does the trick for now.

this video tutorial helped a lot Organic Groups Basics

Ole Martin, Have you found

Posted by Lakeside on August 19, 2011 at 10:26pm

Ole Martin, Have you found much of a performance hit with Panels or OG?

I'm is not sure that I

Posted by Ole Martin on August 20, 2011 at 5:16am

I'm is not sure that I understand your question. (I'm not so familiar with English :-)
There is not much information about this recently.
"Organic Groups" has a little weakness in that many assistive modules is not come in D7 yet. For example is "Organic Group Forum" also abandoned (http://drupal.org/project/og_forum) until further notice.

I have therefore stopped using Organic Groups for now, and plan to use "Taxonomy" and "Panels" , and there are some nice add-on modules as well, among annnet Taxonomy Access - hide,-list etc. And combined with the Panels, this is a good solution for me to create their own sites for each "group".

I also mentioned the "Context" but I have is not been tested it out properly yet.
(A larger multiple-site I made for a good while ago, consisting of 15 sites, both visible and "private" sites (http://kjelsaas.no/ "Gruppene"))

Some links:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/13046#comment-44729 - I found it just now :-)
Video (it is good) http://itcrack.net/node/881

http://drupal.org/project/og_panels
http://www.tejasa.com/node/160
http://drupal.org/node/553456

Hi guys

Posted by Vic_ on April 23, 2013 at 7:54am

Im building 300 mini sites, Im considering ACL and just using a content type as a mini site, seems do-able,

Reason why I didnt go with OG, is because I feel it has a performance hit. And 300 mini sites is a lot of work.

The goal is to deliver clean code that works - now.

Ok

Posted by mojaray2k on April 23, 2013 at 8:05am

How does ACL work with external domains. Or are you just going to park or forward domains?

Book

Posted by luthien on April 3, 2014 at 10:15pm

I used the book module to create the mini sites. There are several modules to create the menu navigation and other blocks.