Review Multi-site on Windows-Apache revisions

I'll attempt to review and merge the good bits of the old revision with the new revision.

There's a lot of good new Drupal 7 stuff there, but also there was a lot of very clearly documented stuff in the previous revision, all of which was removed.

In order to combine the best of each, I'll perform a test multisite install with WAMP.

the main problem I see right off the bat with the revisions is that they are a very specific setup- local only sites (specified in a Directory command in each vhost) and in the hosts file. These instructions should be more general and support live as well as local sites!

The instructions were meant to be for a local installation only as a live installation is covered elsewhere. I personally needed these instructions to setup a local environment and feel that they should be local installation only.

Hi uNeedStuff, where exactly is a live installation covered elsewhere? Maybe I'm looking at this wrong but it seems that where the page is organized:

Installation Guide > Advanced and Multi-Site installation > Enable Hosting of Multiple Sites from a single installation > Multi Site on Windows Apache

doesn't indicate to me that the sites need to be local only. Nor do I see a live install for Windows Apache documented anywhere. But if you can point it out to me, it will help me get my revisions in the right place!

In reviewing the multi-site installation howtows under this section, it seems like most of them are fairly incomplete and out of date. (For instance, the Linux one refers to Apache v1.3 and Redhat Linux v6, and is only a paragraph or two).

I spent a good 6-8 hours yesterday rewriting the Windows Apache page, being sure to document every single step, no matter how small. I'm hoping that I can then re-use a lot of the material to flesh out the rest of the outdated pages with consistent, detailed instructions.

While pretty much everything in the previous two revisions for this page are now gone, having both of them as a guide was invaluable in documenting all the steps. The new page is more generalized, documents live as well as local dev installations, and is very detailed step by step along the way. Where I can, I've kept original content verbatim, but by the time I was done editing and endlessly previewing, a lot of it is hard to find.

Nonetheless, I think this will be an important first step in improving all the multi-site documentation howtos, which I guess I'll try revising next once someone has had a chance to review these changes.

The updated page should be along later today.

OK the rewrite is now complete and requires a review: Multi-site on Windows-Apache (proposed Drupal 7 update).

here are the changes (from the log field): rewrite page for style and completeness, based on previous two contributors' content. Add information on: 32 vs 64 bit WAMPserver downloads, Windows 2003+ UAC/permission/firewall considerations, live vs local installations, DNS entries vs hosts file entries, New vs existing site databases and codebases, database users and passwords.

The first thing any reviewers will notice is... It's a LOT bigger now (3500+ words). I hope to re-use a great deal of this content to flesh out the other multi-site instruction pages as required, once these changes are promoted.

My thanks to both uNeedStuff and chicagomom for their revisions, both of which I used extensively (in some spots verbatim) to go through the process and create this revision.