Hey all,
Great group new to drupal. I am doing my first drupal site for our K-12 district and will be converting over 12 sites from Word HTML (I know, it was before me) to Drupal. Nothing like taking on a small project for the first one. Our district site is up and now I am working on our 7 elementary buildings. I would like the primary nav bar to be the primary nav for all of the sites, but dont necessarily want to maintain 12 menus. Is there anyway to do this with Drupal multisites other than use full path on the subsequent sites.
Also I have an alerts section for school closings that will be common to all of our sites. When I post to one I would like all the others to display the message. How do I share that between sites.
Thanks for helping a beginner.
Comments
The most effective way to
The most effective way to have identical menus across 12 separate sites would be to develop a small module which defines a navigation block. That way updating that module would update the navigation on all 12 sites. This would depend on your level of familiarity with module development or access to someone who has experience with this.
A less technical (though messier) option is to create the menu as a custom block. Downside here is that you'd then need to copy and paste the blocks html into everyone of the twelve sites.
With regards the alerts you could post them on one of the sites and then get the rest of the sites to display it using the aggregate (or one of the other feed) module. Downside here is that the link for each alert would take them to the site where you posted the alert.
A couple other options
First, you are definitely jumping into a complex project for your first Drupal-based project. My advice is to start slowly, in small increments, to avoid making any architectural decisions that you would need to undo later.
It's easier to rollback and rebuild on a smaller number of sites.
So, a few other options:
Domain Access: this would allow you to run several sites in a semi-connected way. This setup is not for the faint of heart: http://drupal.org/project/domain
Features: the Features module lets you push config options to code, and maintain these common features between multiple sites: http://drupal.org/project/features
The Remote Blocks module: http://drupal.org/project/remoteblocks -- this project is VERY new, and doesn't have a point release, so I would not recommend using it at this point. But it could be useful in some situations down the road.
From your administrative perspective, if you are going to be maintaining this many sites, you should probably familiarize yourself with Aegir and Drush: http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system and http://drupal.org/project/drush
Last but not least, you will sleep a whole lot better at night if you have your site's code checked into a code repository (cvs, svn, git, etc). Running this many sites, you will have some complexity; having a reliable backup with version control will be invaluable.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey