Multisite Drupal vs. standalone Drupal vs. Wordpress for associated setup

I think you know the answer: Wordpress is a fine solution if what you want to do exactly matches its capabilities. Drupal is the preferred solution if you want to be able to innovate and grow in unpredictable directions.

We regard community engagement as an enhancement to our brands and are committed to integrating community interaction deeply with our news content, so we don't push blogging off into a silo.

I've done multi-site installs of Drupal and have created separate standalone Drupal installations. There are benefits and downsides to either approach.

The upside to doing a multi-site Drupal installation is that you don't have to separately download and update the third-party modules for each of your websites. Let's assume for example that you want to have Site 1 use the Views, CCK and Ubercart modules, while Site 2 will use Views, CCK, Notifications and Messaging. You have some modules that both sites use (Views and CCK) but also a module that is only used by Site 1 (Ubercart), and a couple of modules that are only used by Site 2 (Notifications and Messaging). Easy to do. You simply download Views, CCK, Ubercart, Notifications and Messaging into the sites/all/modules. Then you enable the modules you want for each site using admin/build/modules. In the future, when you need to update any of the modules, you'll be simultaneously updating the code for both sites.

The downside to doing a multi-site Drupal installation follows from the upside. You can't update the code for one website without simultaneously updating the code for the other site, because they're sharing the same codebase. Generally I've found that this doesn't matter much except when the time rolls around to do major version upgrades of Drupal, such as from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Sometimes major version upgrades require some time and hassle. Unanticipated issues can pop up, such as discovering that there is no Drupal 6 version of a contributed module that I'm using on a Drupal 5 website. If that's the case with Site 1 but not Site 2, you might want to go ahead and update Site 2 to Drupal 6 and wait until the contributed module issue is resolved before updating Site 2. This is a little bit easier to do if the two sites are not sharing the same codebase.

In practice, though, it's not that big a deal. If Site 1 and Site 2 are sharing the same codebase, you can split them off by simply making a second copy of your entire Drupal directory and using copy 1 for Site 1, and copy 2 for Site 2.

The only other issues that occur to me off the top of my head are that setting up a multisite install is a little more tricky than setting up two entirely separate Drupal sites. Not hugely tricky, but it might add a few hours to setup time if you haven't done it before. And, you should be careful during the setup that you create separate directories for file uploads for each site. Otherwise, your file uploads for each site will all get dumped into the same directory. Again, this isn't a big problem, but down the road you might wish you had them in separate directories, if and when you decide that you want to split each site onto its own separate codebase.

Sheldon Rampton
Research director, Center for Media & Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org
http://drupal.org/user/13085

From a security stance, one thing you need to realize is that Wordpress doesn't use temporary tables, thus requires that MySQL's 'dump' permission must be given to the Wordpress' installed user id account. For a site that has production data on it, this opens up the possibility of having the site be subject to a higher number of SQL injections attempts, which could possibly corrupt or destroy sensitive data on your site and/or database.

Drupal, on the other hand, doesn't require the use of the 'drop' permission in a production state.

-- Michael

Shyamala,

As yet, I don't know what information, if any, will be shared between these sites.

But, thanks for the link to your page showing comparisons between multi site and Organic Groups. That is food for thought as we wrestle with this.

Geoff

I'm heading down this path myself and am wondering if there are any memory constraints/issues with a mulitsite setup? Most of my clients insist on spending very little on hosting and as such we get stuck on shared hosts with limit or uncontrollable PHP memory and this causes many issues with third party modules.

@tcom, If you need a great server for Drupal, try www.HotDrupal.com . They have some plans that are really inexpensive. It is set up just for Drupal, it's shared and managed on a VPS. Steve manages and builds the servers, he knows his stuff. Just load Drupal and have fun. The servers are fast. But, it's set up just for Drupal and does not have anything installed that Drupal doesn't need. I've been there a year with 2 Drupal sites, I like it.