By Lord Pachelbel on

We're developing a site in Drupal that will have a paid-access web application, and I'm wondering if the public-facing marketing/informational content and the paid-access part of the site should be built into one Drupal installation, or if the public-facing site should be built in its own Drupal installation and the application in another.

Drupal multisite is not an option because the hosting platform (Pantheon) doesn't support it.

I'm leaning towards doing it the second way, where the application is hosted on a subdomain of the public site and they're two separate Drupal installations. One big advantage would be that theme and code updates to the application wouldn't block similar pending updates to the public site, and vice-versa.

What do you think?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I would build a single site, easier to maintain. It also avoids the problem of two different urls, which always makes me wonder if I am in the correct place.

Harry Hobbes’s picture

Harry Hobbes commented

Further, a consolidated site, or at least the appearance of a consolidated site, goes a long way towards credibility; as in the visitor perceiving the site (owners, operators, developers, etc.) are credible.

As a longtime website visitor, being bounced from one site to the next tends to raise concerns about credibility in my mind.

A consolidated site implicitly says you are who you say you are. Amazon.com comes to mind.

Lord Pachelbel’s picture

Lord Pachelbel commented

I'm not talking about having the public site at somedomain.com and the paid-access site at someotherdomain.com, I'm talking about having the public site at somedomain.com and the paid-access site at a subdomain like dashboard.somedomain.com or users.somedomain.com.

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

I'm building something like this right now, and I put them on the same Drupal installation. Easier to maintain.