Posted by acoburn4 on May 10, 2010 at 3:21pm
We are building a website with multiple sub-domains in Drupal. Each website should be treated separately with its own content. We want to share SOME content among sub-domains (not much), keeping in mind that SEO is of upmost importance. (no duplicate content among sub-domains). How would you approach this project? Would you use Domain Access or Subdomain module? or another module that I haven't heard about?
Comments
I'm not familiar with the
I'm not familiar with the Subdomain module, but Domain Access will do this job just fine, assuming each site will need the same low-level stuff; same modules, same content types, same Views, etc. If these things will be changing from site to site, you'd want to take the standard Drupal multisite approach instead.
I'm a bit confused by this bit, though:
The Boise Drupal Guy!
Each website should be
That pretty much puts DA (Domain Access) out of the running. DA's strength is when some content is shared across domains.
With the information you've provided, I recommend a traditional multisite installation (instead of DA or Subdomain) with one codebase and multiple databases.
Sharing SOME Content
Thank you for responding so fast!
Garrett - about sharing SOME content among sub-domains. What I'm trying to accomplish is to have nodes published exclusively on one sub-domain. However, I want to be able to access the node title/teaser for a view on my main website (almost like a teaser ad to click to the next website). With domain access, I can "share" content, however I've noticed this can sometimes result in duplicate URLS. For example, if I select "Publish to all affiliates" on my node, then it's published at both www .example. com/node and subdomain. example. com/node
Not ideal from a duplicate content standpoint. Ideally, I don't want to have to create all my views by hand (especially when the site becomes very large, with more than 10 sub-domains). I was hoping someone had an idea here.
Cristefano - Yes, every website should be treated separately with its own content. The only time I need to share content is for views I'm creating for supporting blocks on the subdomain or main sites. For example, on my main site I will have a blog. Sometimes the blog entries relate to subdomain1. So, on subdomain 1, I want to publish a list of blog entries that are related to this website. I just need a title and a teaser. Would you still recommend a traditional multisite installation?
Well, a node and its
Well, a node and its title/teaser are all part of the same unit of content as far as Drupal is concerned, so, yeah, there's not really a way to publish the teaser across all sites without also publishing the node (ugly hacks like aggregating your own RSS feed notwithstanding). Writing a custom module which blocks or redirects folks who try to view the full node shouldn't be too difficult, though (for someone who knows how to write custom modules).
As for creating Views by hand, with proper planning, you should be able to just use one View which uses arguments and/or filters to only show content from a desired site or sites. I've successfully taken this approach in the past.
The Boise Drupal Guy!
Multiple or multisite
I'm working on 1 domain and 15 subdomain, and use the Multiple installation. See the beginning of this video.
http://gotdrupal.com/videos/multisites-vs-multiple-sites
Each side has its own modules and theme but share users and roles. Main domain have blocks of RSS content on the first page (or on several pages) of all its subdomain. I use Simpleviews to create RSS. I will also try to share some nodes but have not tried this yet. Thought I should share ID from the database in some of the subdomains "settings.php".
I've tried several different modules for this, but none gave me what I wanted, and I will also be dependent on these modules that they are updated and are error-free all the time, if not all the pages will "go down" at the same time .
Made only one side almost finish and changed only the prefix for the tables in the database and linked the new pages to its own prefix. Almost all the work is done.
The pages I'm making is for a sports team and therefore we share User and Role table. In this way a user can be edited on a page, the webmaster of another site and regular use on all other pages.