So I have a puzzle I am trying to work out. I have two different Drupal websites, both with unique content. However, I need to share the "reviews" section of the website between the two. In the sense that, each website with have the exact same reviews content. How would this best be accomplished in Drupal?
From a PHP standpoint I would just make a separate DB to hold my reviews that both sites can read/write to. However since everything in Drupal hinges on node ID's I'm not sure how best to accomplish this. So far the only idea I have is a custom module or fancy cron job that querys my separate "reviews" DB and then populates actual Drupal nodes with the reviews from the separate DB.
Any additional theories or ideas would be welcomed. Or any suggestions for modules that may help me accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
I'm assuming that by
I'm assuming that by "reviews" you mean "comments". If that's the case or if there is another module you are using that allows the production of review nodes then comments or those review nodes would have their own table that reference each content node (being reviewed) via an ID. If you want to show the sames reviews on the two websites then you would need to show the same content (to pull up the corresponding reviews). Although I think I may not be understanding your request since you say each site has unique content.
When I say unique content
When I say unique content I mean:
Lets say Site A has a page titled "Bob's Big Boy" with a node id of 6, while Site B also has a page called "Bob's Big Boy" with a node id of 12. Both need to get the same user-created "reviews", however they will not always have the same node id. And when I say "reviews" I mean a rather robust review system with a voting module, comments, etc. as opposed to one single node "comment".
I suppose the issues that I am seeing are
1) Both sites will not share the same node id for the parent page, thus the child "reviews" cannot be pulled based on that
2) Drupal needs to have access to these reviews, in the sense that when you visit the parent page they will show up
3) A user needs to be able to create a review on Site A and it then show on the corresponding page on Site B, thus my logic for a completely separate DB for the "reviews"
Hopefully that helps to clarify exactly what I'm trying to accomplish here. Oh, and thanks for the quick response by the way =)
I don't know of a module that
I don't know of a module that works in that way, sharing reviews between two sites. You can modify your settings file and share some database tables (you don't actually need multiple databases running).
To get the review system working in the way you want it sounds like you may need some kind of table that holds records referencing which content on which site(s) should correspond to which review nodes. So you might have a single record in this new table that says content node ID 6 on site 1 and content node ID 12 on site 2 should pull up review ID 526 from site 2, or to make things a bit more normalized, you'd have two records, one record for node 6 on site 1 pointing to review 526 on site 2 and one record for node 12 site 2 pointing to review 526 on site 2 (assuming site 2 is where the review was created from).