Posted by earthday47 on October 13, 2010 at 5:48pm
At the risk of self-promotion, I thought I'd share this. In the project I just completed (http://www.thestrong.org), I had to decide whether to use Domain Access or a Multisite installation. I started implementing the Domain Access module, but then changed my mind.
I wrote up the reasons why I abandoned Domain access here.
I'm curious if people agree with my complaints about the Domain Access module, or had a different experience?
Comments
agree
I agree with your post. We recently came in to fix a site that was using Domain Access to accomplish certain business needs and it wasn't getting the job done. The complexity of trying to manage the content from the interface to the client was overwhelming and the restrictions proved too much. We actually decided that instead of a multi subdomain site the client could use path as an alternative. Once that was decided we just used the taxonomy permissions module and turned the site over.
I am not criticizing the module, I think it does what its trying to accomplish, but it sounds like it was chosen more than once to try to do more than it was designed for.
Dev and Support: prometsource.com
I've built a site which
I've built a site which currently has about fifteen subsites with Domain Access. I agree that menus are a bit of a nightmare, and I won't even get started on what the Blocks config page looks like. The content listing page issue can be mitigated a bit by recreating the content listing page using Views configured to only show content on "this" site.
Ultimately, though, one of the primary goals of the project was being able to easily share content across subsites, and at that, Domain Access is a champ, once you wrap your head around how it works.
The Boise Drupal Guy!
I wonder if some of the
I wonder if some of the clutter can be mitigated by using Organic Groups, instead of rolling your own Views listings?
Many ways to skin a...
Good write-up. You mention a lot of menu confusion in terms of what menu belongs to what content and that it made structuring a pain. This is exactly why I created the outline designer (http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer). Books automatically create the back-end menu associations but the traditional UI sucks for using it. We've been able to manage "branches" of menu items in our sites via Books w. Outline Designer. Menu Block allows for creating selective blocks to render parts of the hierarchy based on where you are, books gives you previous / next / up style navigation in addition to menu items. Books really gives you maximum flexibility I've found in structuring content (from an admin perspective).
Again though, good write up. A lot of people Push Domain Access and I really like but I have done a few Domain Access and an equal number of shared table multisite installs. While I enjoy the flexibility of a pure multisite, Domain Access does make certain scenario's significantly easier to manage settings. Though Features is really starting to make this advantage a bit moot....
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Domain Access is really
Domain Access is really geared toward sharing content rather than features. Any site that includes more than one domain should carefully weighted: in some cases Domain Access is the way to go, in some cases it's not.
On one of my sites I had similar problem with taxonomy instead of menu - and I ended up writing Term Tree module that served two purposes - not loading everything at once and therefore saving me rendering time and in addition providing me with hooks to disable items not available on current domain. Even though I wrote the module to solve an issue I had with DA I've since used it on another site with large taxonomy. Was the taxonomy issue DA-s fault - I wouldn't say so. You can have long menu/taxonomy lists with or without it.
For the project, Multisite is
For the project, Multisite is obviously the correct solution. I like the article, i think it shows a good understanding of the pro/con and the actual needs of the site(s) involved.
As @akucharski points out, many people jump into DA without quite knowing if it's the best solution.
As for the original post:
Issue #3.2 is something I'm currently working on in D7, and issue #4 is perfectly valid. I think #3.1 is bogus, since we provide a better admin experience out of the box. #2 is valid, but there isn't much to be done about it -- any time you try to add all or most content into the menu, you'll have issues, DA or not.
But, really, point #1 is the obvious one. if you aren't sharing lots of content, no real need to go down the DA path.
Personally, I'd retitle this post (and that post) as "Why we chose Multisite over Domain Access."
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
Retitle
I agree.
I actually think a version of
I actually think a version of this decision tree needs to go in the Module Handbook.
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
I like the title change, so
I like the title change, so it's done!
Yes sharing content is the big question. But really if it was 6 small sites with ~5 pages each, actually Domain Access is a really attractive solution. But any big site, where there's an almost overwhelming number of nodes, taxonomy terms, and menus, an additional solution (like custom Views, Outline Designer, Term Tree, what have you) becomes necessary, even critical.
I think if I had to sketch a basic "decision tree", I would go with the following:
Could we add a subsection to this page entitled "Is Domain Access right for you?"
One important detail
One thing I should mention, is that I, somewhat naively, put all my eggs into Domain Access early on in the project, and was committed to making it work. I thought we had lots of shared components, but it gradually became clear that there were only a few overlaps. Which made switching mid-game a painful process.
So the qualifier of "criticisms" was because of my initial excitement, and then laborious frustration of putting a square peg in a round hole.
Happens to the best of us.
Happens to the best of us.
Here's an interesting challenge:
Site 1 has subdomains that will not share the user table, but will share modules.
Site 2 has a different domain, but will share the user table with site 1, and has different modules but will share some page content.
They are currently on two different servers, but I can place them on the same machine to share DB etc.
From what I have read I have a hybrid of the functionality between the two approaches.
Multisite or Domain Access? Which one should be used to do the trick here....
Thanks in advance for your tips!