Notes from the 6/19 Meetup

The 6/19 meetup was once again at Four Kitchens studios. During tonight's gathering, David Strauss talked about multi-site Drupal configuration, basic site configuration procedure, and (the night's main topic) most essential and useful modules for a Drupal site. The meeting was very well attended (about 20 people) and David (as always) gave a great presentation.

The summary conclusion for multi-site installation is that it's less than meets the eye. It allows you to share one code installation across multiple Drupal sites. It doesn't solve the hard problems, such as database updates when a module is updated. It also introduces problems, such as leaking content between sites (e.g. a shared files directory).

(My personal solution is to use a dedicated installation for each site, but symlink sites/all to a common directory so I can share modules across sites. Unlike multi-site I need to do core updates individually, but that's done much less frequently than module updates. Like multi-site I still have the hassle of running running update.php everywhere when a module updates. Basically, it provides 90% of the benefit of multi-site without the related "content leakage" problem.)

Here are my notes from the rest of the meeting:

10:50pm update: Per request from David, I've moved the rest of this article a wiki page so others could contribute to the notes.