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By cnewtonne on
Hi all,
After installing an playing around with 5 of the CMS solutions I finally settled on Drupal. Why?
1- Simple and easy to start with, yet limitless.
2- easy install and flawless.
3- Comprehensive documentation and active forum.
I was new to the whole LAMP technology. So I spent about 3 weeks on a daily basis learning it. I feel comfortable now (still some to go) with Mysql, Apache, PHP, and Drupal. Liunx was a breeze since I'm used it any way.
Now that I got my first Drupal site up, I would like to pose these 2 questions please...
1) My primary use for it is on our corporate intranet. I will be using to document and capture my team's work. I may also end up creating more sites for other teams. How do I best layout my sites knowing that...
- I will only have this one IP address. So I really do not need to use this feature. Unless I hear otherwise. Any way, I do not have access to our company's DNS nor will I be granted other host names or IPs.
- As such, if my install is in /usr/local/apache2/hdtocs/my_protals, then can my sites simply be ...
.../my_protals/team1
.../my_protals/team2
.../my_protals/team3
then I cam simply have each dir with its own settings.php pointed to a separate DB.
Is this a best-practice layout? If not, what else can you suggest?
2) I browsed via the entire documentation site, I did not see something like 'create you first site' that takes you from step1 to the end. I mean step by step? If there is one, where is it?
Thank you all.
Comments
Complicated
Your solution will work, but you will wind up with multiple unrelated websites.
Consider using Organic Groups instead.
Well...
Rather than "separate" web sites, I would look at using a taxonomy to create sections for each team. That would also allow someone the ability to be on more than one team.
I don't know how well it will do for you, but setting up your first site is what my book (link below) is about.
Nancy W.
now running 5 sites on Drupal so far
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in Your Database
NancyDru
Ok. This is good thanks. But
Ok. This is good thanks. But can someone validate these statements please.
- If I'm NOT use vhosts, then can I still put my sites in drupal/sites/...
- If I do, then my urls will look something like www...../sites/team1 ... etc. Right?
- what is 'organic groups' ?
I'm looking into this 'taxonomy' concept today.
There are multiple ways to
There are multiple ways to go about setting up such a site, depending on your specific needs. Do a search for intranet here on d.o. and you'll see it's been done in a variety of ways. One of the ways is using organic groups. Another is just using categories/taxonomy and some of the various access control modules. I found this article personally interesting http://drupal.org/node/62582
As to your questions... putting things in the sites directory is really only for multisites, unless it's in the sites/all directory ( read http://drupal.org/node/276 for more info). And no, even if it was a multisite your URLs would not appear like that. There's some good reading on multisites http://drupal.org/node/43816
Organic groups is a set of modules that allow you to define different "groups" each user can be in. Then people can post things within a group, there can be an administrator of the group, etc. Check out http://groups.drupal.org which uses OG.
this is all nice and good info, but ...
Almost every multi-site doc I read assumes DNS or host-based resolution for the multiple sites. In my scenario, it isn't. It is one host that has all the sites and the ONLY one all teams or users will be putting in their browser URL box.
So that leaves me with one option and that is to have my sites laid out using directory structure of apache's default document root. If I want to proceed as such, how do I lay out my sites assuming my drupal is installed here /usr/local/apache2/htdocts/drupal. Which one of these scenarios is the most appropriate...
1) Copy .../sites/default to .../sites/team1, ...etc
.../drupal/sites/team1
.../drupal/sites/teamt2
.../drupal/sites/teamt3
Then users can access their respective sites using...
http://my_server.com/sites/team1 or http://my_server.com/sites/team2
2) Copy .../drupal to .../team1 (an all others) then have users access the site using http://my_server.com/team1
3) A mix of the above 2 where I do first one then create symlinks in .../drupal to point to each site in .../drupal/sites.
Please bear in mind that I'm NOT using any host resolution methods. Any other ideas are welcomed too.
Thanks again.
Look into these other
Look into these other methods first before deciding to go with multisites, since I think you are still a little confused about it. Multisites is *not* the best way to go in this situation, I think.
point taken, but conceptually...
Brenda,
point taken and I will.
However, from a conceptual standpoint, if I do indeed for whatever reason wanted to do multiple sites, can you comment on my previous post please.
Okay.. in response to
Okay.. in response to this.
If you want to have multisites in subdirectories, then yes, you would create your structure as sites/team 1, sites/team2, etc. But they wouldn't access it via http://my_server.com/sites/team1, because the sites directory is for Drupal's internal use. Usually, with multisites, they're set up with various domains or subdomains, so the folders within sites would be named after the domains. For example, within sites there would be two folders, default and subdomain.my_server.com. Within Apache's config files, BOTH these domains would be pointing to Drupal's root install, and from there Drupal does the work to know to load which site based on what's found in the sites directory.
So your answer sounds like it would be option 3, where you would need to create symlinks to get your desired affect of having http://www.my_server.com/team1 go to the appropriate site.
Hope that made sense.