Thoughts on Syndicated Content + Multisites

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laughnan's picture

Hello All -

I am new to the Portland Drupal Group so forgive me if this is not the correct place to put this. I am setting up a Drupal 7 multi-site (sub-directories). I was wondering how possible it was to create a site dedicated solely for shared content (News articles). It wouldn't be accessible from the web, but it would be a one-stop place for users to enter content (a specific content type) that would be reflected throughout all the subsequent multi sites.

Thoughts?

Alex

P.S. they will all share the same database (different table prefixes).

Comments

I might suggest you take a

mpgeek's picture

I might suggest you take a look at how Crell thinks about this: http://www.palantir.net/blog/multi-headed-drupal. I might also suggest you come to the meetings, as there is endless knowledge buried there.

Great insight! I will check

laughnan's picture

Great insight! I will check it out! It is one of my biggest goals to begin to attend the meetings. They seem very informative and interesting! I will make it happen!

Thank you!

jsimonis's picture

Thank you for that link. I'm working on a site for our student clubs and orgs at our college. There is currently no online presence for student orgs and clubs, no online calendar, etc. We want to change that.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to let them have their own domains, share all events from their sites to the main site, and let them control their own sites. I've used multi-site a lot (too much for these tiny sites) and OG a lot. It's looking like maybe OG and Domain Access would work the best.

another version

rjleigh's picture

One variation from the Crell options would be to set up a multisite setup (all separate databases) and use feeds to pull news items from a single source.

Does the feed module only

laughnan's picture

Does the feed module only work on separate databases? The Multisite configuration that I am working with are sub-directories (i.e. example.com/site and example.com/site2)

Not sure of your question -

rjleigh's picture

Not sure of your question - you could set up a site with subdirectories that was delivered by one drupal installation (single database) or two (that's a multisite install). If it was in one database, there would be no need to use feeds to move the content.

As stated above, the meetings and especially the brewpal meetup are a great place to talk about this stuff in more detail.

I just have multiple sites

laughnan's picture

I just have multiple sites (connected by symlinks and adjustment in sites.php). I have some multi sites installed on the same database (different prefixes) and then a few multi sites on separate databases completely.

I just have multiple sites

laughnan's picture

I just have multiple sites (connected by symlinks and adjustment in sites.php). I have some multi sites installed on the same database (different prefixes) and then a few multi sites on separate databases completely.

legacy database

MarketStone's picture

Drupal eloquently connects to multiple databases. Check out page 58

http://issuu.com/petrellis/docs/drupal01/85?mode=a_p

Multiple instances verses sharing databases

emptyvoid's picture

I built a fairly complex multi-site platform for PSU in 2008 and it probably had very similar requirements to what you are describing. If you happen to see me at a meeting I'd be happy to go over the pros and cons I experienced while defining the architecture and building it.

The short overview

1 source code structure
400 drupal sites on one source tree
1 database with table aliases for each drupal instance (because we had to share users, roles, sessions, etc)

1 dedicated drupal instance that was for "shared" content authoring. And I built a custom client module to pool then render content by taxonomy/filter criteria on all of the 400 sites.

At the time feeds just didn't exist so I rolled it all custom (using the Drupal framework of course).

Robert Foley Jr
Solutions Architect
http://www.robertfoleyjr.com

Portland (Oregon)

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