I think I am suffering from paralysis by analysis in deciding whether to use domain access or multisite.
I am working on a school board's development of a new Drupal configured website. The main school board website has been developed and launched, and now I am working on the school sites. There are around 30 subdomains that will be used for these school sites.
I was initially attracted to domain access because of the ease of administration. There is the ability to share content & users as required. Having said that, there will not be that much shared content; only board level content displayed at all the schools. For the most part, each school will have unique content.
Therefore, I started to lean towards having a multisite setup for each of the schools with each having a separate database. Any updates would be able to be done across all the schools, which would have to be down during school breaks. One major concern in terms of using the multisite setup is how to I capture shared content; from a separate database. From what I understand one must build a module to access a different database. I am reluctant to write this amount, or type, of code with my current level of Drupal experience.
In terms of users, my thought is that I would use a script to update respective users to the respective schools.
Can anyone who has any experience in making this type of decision share some of their insights and experiences? Is there another avenue I could be pursuing?
Comments
Not to make your life more
Not to make your life more confusing, but you might want to consider Organic Groups (OG) module + Spaces module as well. It's similar to Domain Access, but does so in a more 'Drupal' way.
I've done a few of these 'One parent site, many subsites' projects, and the most important requirement is often to minimize the time spent managing the sites after launch. Think about how much time you (and all the content creators) spend managing just a single site. Now multiply that by 31. You'll realize that it will require a full-time position just to do maintenance on the sites. Because of this you'll want to spec things out in such a way that keeps things as consistent as possible between the sites. For this reason OG + Spaces is often the best approach - each school can be a separate 'group' that is accessed via a subdomain, but it's all really just a single Drupal site. The Open Atrium distribution uses these tools in a similar way (though it's designed to be an intranet).
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Dave is right. . . .
Plan ahead.
Here is a decent overview of your many options, with some graphics to help visualize the differences:
http://www.palantir.net/blog/multi-headed-drupal
I concur with Dave. To
I concur with Dave. To choose the right solution you'll need to first consider a few different factors (off the top of my head):
You can then consider the pro/cons for each style of implementation and move forward.