By Wyld on

After a search, I've read through about a dozen entries around the forums .. and ended up more confused than informed. So I thought I'd document what I'm after, and with luck, something can come of this post that a) helps me, and b) helps others who are after this specific instance of Drupal.

My aim is to create three sites, using a standard www.domain as the core site (which end up being a t-shirt and gamer shop), and having two subdomains under it, which will be pwned.domain (our community site, with news, reviews, forums, guild/clan tools, LAN booking service, etc), and admin.domain which strangly enough, will be a place for the admins on either of the two sites to be able to discuss things in privacy away from the userbase.

Each site will have its own content, but will share userlogin details across the board, so when someone creates an account on www.domain or pwned.domain, the same base questions will apply (and be used in the sites).

Modules .. I plan on using quite a few modules in the pwned.domain area, to help support a community based site. Some of these can be used in the www.domain but really, thats going to evolve into the ecommerce front, so I'm fairly sure that I will need different module setups for each site. The admin site will contain minimal modules, as its really there as a knowledgebase and discussion area more than anything else.

I think the knowledge for something akin to this setup would be of benefit to the community, if only for those who wish to run what could evolve into a larger site, and wish to have a seperate admin area. Seperation of the admin.domain and www.domain allows distinct control over access without the need to use modules. If I understand the workings of Drupal well enough, I could run this without modules itself, and from a site maintenance point of view, this is A Good Thing (tm).

My only question is, which is better ... different DBs for each site (db_www, db_pwned, db_admin) with shared users on db_www ... or one DB using prefixes and sharing internally to one set of tables. Would there be a benefit to seperate the DB instances, say for access to content? I know MySQL has some issues with locking .. so this could be a nice feature.

Anyway, think that defines everything .. here's hoping for some pointers in the "best" right direction ;)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x