By airbag8717 on

Hello,

I'm evaluating using Drupal for our business needs and I had some questions about the multi site deployment.

I am looking to deploy a large amount of sites (roughly 100) that will each be a sub domain of my main domain. I would like one code base so that upgrades and changes will be easy for all sites. However I need each site to be somewhat independent from each other say look and feel, but share other things such as user rights and content.

Modules, such as an Calendar Event module would display a different set of events for each site, but hopefully draw from one database.

Also I was wondering how a multi site deployment of that many sites would hold up at say 1 million page views a month.

Is Drupal the right choice for me?

Thanks for your help.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

gte451f’s picture

gte451f commented

If you are talking about 1 million page view a month on Drupal you will probably want some robust hardware.

"I would like one code base so that upgrades and changes will be easy for all sites."
This is the default way a multi site operates. You just set up the subdomains to point to the appropriate... sites/subdomainfolder/settings.php

If each site will use the same user bases, posted content and just display differently you might have to seperate out some tables and that could get tricky. Not impossible, just a little more involved.

FIRESIDE91’s picture

FIRESIDE91 commented

Just as the abve comment stated. However for sharing user tables I don't remember how but there was some way using arrays in a sub-sites settings.php file to map tables.

airbag8717’s picture

airbag8717 commented

Thanks, this is helping as I start to move forward.

Two more quick questions:

1) For content sharing and publishing with a multi site deployment, I'm thinking I would need an db architecture consisting of id table structures that then embeds the content into a site(s) template(s) based on the relevant id. Is this the path I should look into?

2) Does anyone know of a component / module or a developer who has set up multi site content sharing and publishing from both an admin and user standpoint that would help me in building this project out?

Thanks in advance.

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

See this handbook thread... http://drupal.org/node/2622

I tried the multi site... I had performance issues, though.

Problems I had:
1. Managing rights and access permissions can get very very tricky.
2. There is not much room for errors, like selecting the wrong database. This could mess up a lot of things.

so I cancelled the idea

If anyone is happily using hte multi site on a well traffic network, I would like to know your tricks and tips.

Marcel
http://computingnews.com
http://01ftp.com