By birdmanx35 on

Bit of background:

I use four installs of CivicSpace at OpenSourceHost. I'm about to convert those four installs to Drupal 4.7.4, and would like to combine the four installs first. When I first created the sites, I didn't realize that Drupal had multisite features, and now I would like to combine the four installs into my main install.

Is there a step by step tutorial for doing this, and if not, how do I do it?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

pcwick’s picture

pcwick commented

Unfortunately, I do not know of a tutorial about multisites.

The best place to begin is probably the README.txt in your Drupal directory. It describes the concept clearly and succinctly. README.txt is also posted here: http://drupal.org/node/260

A while back, someone, thankfully, culled and pulled together numerous threads about multisites and organized that information in the handbook. http://drupal.org/node/43816

I suggest that after reading README.txt you read the handbook page titled "4.6 Multi-Site from single code base". I skimmed the page and it looks like it remains relevant for 4.7. There are some irrelevant tangents, but much of it is helpful. http://drupal.org/node/20663

I highly recommend that you also read in the Handbook under "Best Practices" the page titled "Use the /sites directory to keep Drupal tidy". I assure you that following these recommendations will save you headaches and time later, ha, ha. http://drupal.org/node/14697

You will want to decide if you will use separate databases for each site, or a single, prefixed database. In my opinion, the prefixed database adds a layer of complexity that may be best avoided when first trying to grasp the multisite setup.

If when you set up your multisite test your browser loads the sites, then I think you can ignore all the many threads about symlinks. I use an inexpensive host with a web panel and I believe that takes care of the linking, but if your browser can't find the multisite directory and your website, then you may need to sort through the posts on symlinks.

That should get you started. I think you will want to set up a test domain and play with a test multisite setup a bit before you try to convert your actual sites to multisites. Now, the multisite concept seems simple and elegant, but it took me some tinkering before I said ah ha.

Kent Stanley’s picture

Kent Stanley commented

There is a little tutorial I wrote in http://drupal.org/node/107347. I am sure the steps there will work for you. For the real details you have to refer back to drupal install / readme.