Although I have somewhat limited experience with doing multisite installs, multisite has never been a great experience for me. I'd love to hear about other Drupal developers experiences with multisite to see if I'm unique in my aversion to Drupal multisite.

The biggest problem I've run into is that the different sites have little or no content and functionality in common, but the multisite relied heavily on Domain Access. Symptoms included paths showing up on the wrong domain, confusion for site builders over which checkboxes to use for Domain Access settings in the node edit form. Additionally, Views couldn't pull in the content from other domains without exposing those nodes on the other domain, and a maintenance nightmare of "Push and Pray" resulting in no security upgrades for several years.

I've written a somewhat detailed post on my blog summarizing my experience. I've also read similar thoughts from Pantheon's Josh Koenig.

Am I being ridiculous? Are there situations where you've had success with Drupal multisite? What have your experiences been with Drupal multisite as a site owner or site builder? As a themer? Developer? Core contributor? What does it do well for you? What sucked?

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

I think you're conflating domain sites with multisite. "drupal multisite" refers to the simple fact that multiple independent sites can share a core codebase via the sites/ folder structure and is entirely independent of setting up multiple sites, which can share stuff, with the domain module.

imo, 'drupal multisite' is more trouble than it's worth -- particularly since the advent of drush which negates the one big advantage multisite had (upgrades).

i can't speak to the domain method, but with 10k in reported installations, it seems to have gained a decent foot hold.

earnshae’s picture

I have several boxes running multisite installs and several boxes that run single site installs.

I think what you have to realize multisite is a tool for a job and you have to understand your job very well before you employee a tool.

As for your specific job you know what you are doing best so I will leave that thinking up to you.

I just figure I will contribute my experiences for your consideration.

The first thing I will mention is that when I worked out my deployments it took allot of thought and consideration before I figured the full configuration which worked best for my needs.

Specific to my configuration I needed to configure Apache, Drupal, mysql, and preform some bash scripting to lower the complexity of updating. If this is not for you (ie you are not running the box) I would recommend against it. If you are a intermediate systems administrator you should be able to handle it no problem. Key to making it run correctly is virtual host files for Apache.

The second thing that I think bares consideration was that the documentation is lacking, and there seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding out there on how to pull this off so asking questions often leads down the wrong path.

I spent a month of trial and error, googling, and asking questions(here) before I finally found this book:

http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-7-multi-sites-configuration/book

Normally I don't buy books for this kind work I prefer to answer it by searching the internet but it turns out to have been a solid purchase. This information just wasn't out there. The author is very straight forward and provides basically the tutorial I was looking for as well as a detailed description of all the internal workings of a multisite install. The only thing I ended up changing was I modified some locations so that I could script out the update process to avoid doing it manually. After reading it the task became very simple.

Anyways in the instances that I deploy it. It works great and saves me allot of hassle and MONEY by letting me stack up low volume sites on single instances.