Posted by jasonabc on February 9, 2012 at 5:32pm
Hi - I've been trying to find the answer to these questions but not had much luck so hoping someone here can help me :-)
1) With a multisite setup - can all sites be administered via a single backend or is it separate Admins for each individual site?
2) Are logins shared between sites? So if I login on Site A and then go to Site C I am logged in on both? Anything else that can be shared between sites?
thanks!
Jason
Comments
1) All separate sites are
1) All separate sites are administered within those sites.
2) This can be achieved through sharing some database tables between sites (user, perhaps roles, sessions, some other as well), look for shared login.
You may also consider building your site with Domain Access, which basically is a tool to have two almost separate sites within one Drupal site. This way you would have only one Drupal site to admin and "two or more sites single sign on".
--
Perttu Ehn
Domain Access; definitely.
Domain Access; definitely.
Single admin site for multisite setup
We consistently deploy multisite setups for customers with a single administrative backend.
We leave the default site as the admin site: drupal/sites/all
Then we setup additional sites: drupal/sites/site1.com, drupal/sites/site2.com
This allows content to be created in the default (admin) site and targeted to any of the other sites.
No additional modules like domain Access are required for this.
If you are going to want some data separate per site you'll need to namespace those tables in your settings.php files for each multisite.
many thanks. So the default
many thanks. So the default setup is separate Admins correct? How do you prevent site1, site2 from having their own admin and using the Admin of the default site? Like if I go to drupal/sites/site1.com/admin I'll get the Admin for site1 right? How do you prevent this?
Also how does the default Admin push content out to either site1 or site2 or both?
default admin
You could just setup a redirect for the site admins to go to your default admin in your htaccess file.
So for example, if they go to site1.com/admin they would be redirected to your default admin.
For example, we normally setup a default admin subdomain admin.mycompany.com and point it to the default site.
Then we setup the multisites and they use admin.mycompany.com to administer them.
However, if you do end up namespacing some tables, you may need to login to the admins of those individual sites to manage some stuff.
For example, we namespace the comments table so that we can have backend administrative comments and frontend comments.
To manage the frontend comments you need to login to the frontend admin.
Of course you could create a module that lets you administer that stuff from the default admin site but that would be a bit of work.
It just depends on your requirements.
Adam, Is it possible to use
Adam,
Is it possible to use the same settings file on all of the domains? Or would this create a bottleneck for the DB?
If it was possible to use the same settings file on all domains, then content could be redirected by using different content types. Yes?
On another note. Doesn't all of this shared content impact SEO performance? What do you do direct the spiders to count only one site as the site to spider--to prevent duplicate content?
settings and duplicate content
Each site needs its own settings file.
For directing content to each domain, we just use a central taxonomy.
Then on each of the multisites we display navigation linking to whichever of those terms we want.
For example on the admin site we might have a taxonomy called Sections with something like:
- Site1
--- my section 1
--- my section 2
- Site2
--- my section 3
--- my section 4
As for duplicate content , there are a variety of best practices for handling that if you are going to be publishing the same content to different multi sites (in our situation it is generally different content).
You can use meta tags in your links like noindex and follow.
Google webmaster tools also offers some tools for specifying which domain is the one they should index.
You can find some info here:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Adam, Wow! That is cool.
Adam,
Wow! That is cool. Hadn't seen this mentioned before.
I must admit the dots are still not connecting for me. The taxonomy part is brilliant. What I'm dim about is setting it up so when content is written using the root site getting it to display on one of the multisites.
Just to be clear the root and multisites all share the same DB. Right?
If you know of a tutorial for D7; it would be most appreciated.