MultisitesPackage

Multi-Homing for everyone!

Created by: xing, Last modification: 03 Jun 2009 (09:23 UTC) by Lester Caine

Multisites allows you to customize certain aspects of your site, depending on what URL a visitor is accessing. For each multisite you can customize:

  • servername and description
  • browser title, site slogan, description/keywords meta tags, start page
  • a dedicated theme
  • the language
  • header, column, and menu details

The override options for themes need to be brought in line with the current theme engine. The default settings do not line up with the style and theme structure currently provided in R2.6

Facilities provided by multisites have evolved and when used in conjunction with AuthenticationPluginMultisites users can be managed and allowed access on a site by site basis. The facility to restrict content per site is enabled in the general multisites settings.

Use it to

  • characterize: use www.bitweaver.org, doc.bitweaver.org and dev.bitweaver.org for different aspects of a project
  • localize: use en.mysite, en-uk.mysite and uk.mysite to serve different languages to your visitors
  • seperate: band-1-fans.com and band-2-fans.com - one database for 2 different fan sites

Advantages

  • only one database - users feel they are in a different section while it's still using the same database
  • easy maintenance - one install, one upgrade, combined pages (repeat content on all multisites), combine newsletters/shoutbox/search ... and so on
  • visually effective - different sections of your site can sport a different theme (plus you can still use different themes for each package of each multisite)
  • restrict access to content on a site by site basis so that only a subset of the content is seen on any given site (available in Bitweaver 2)
  • Auth:Multisites restricts user logon to sub-sites This prevents a user from accessing material intended for limited access (available in Bitweaver 2)

Notes

  • Multisites is not intended for setting up entirely independend sites with different databases. All URLs access the same database.
  • In all versions below Bitweaver 2 you can not restrict access to content on a site by site basis.
  • Permission roles will need to be reconfigured if it is required to also restrict admin users to their own sites. Currently admin rights override all lower level restrictions, so a site admin role needs to be created in order to allow individual site administration.

Setting up

An outline guide to setting up multisites is provided at Configuring multisites. This has been written from the basis of setting on a Linux web server, but gives pointers for other installations.

Comments

by Kozuch, 03 Apr 2006 (14:26 UTC)
This is nice but the description here is rather simple...

There is no online help here

by Tim Collins, 14 Dec 2006 (16:22 UTC)
I'm so confused — the writer claims there is online help, but there isn't any, and no one else has noticed since April? How do I use the feature?

Multisite? HOW?

by Jack Philips, 31 May 2007 (06:28 UTC)
Why have a feature if there's no simple description/tutorial on how to use it?, Being there's nothing on how to use it, my advice is to uninstall the package, and permanently remove the folder 'multisites' and all its contents from the system.

Any packages I find that don't have instructions on how to use, I just uninstall it, then completely remove the corresponding folder.

Status of Multisites Package

by John Turner, 05 May 2009 (19:15 UTC)
So I am starting a new project that requires a multisite framework and thought I could use this package, but it doesn't seem complete. I don't see any place to edit which site content belongs to, even though the code seems to suggest it is there.

But more importantly I want content that is not assigned to a particular site to default to the current site (seems to make the most sense to me). But that isn't there at all.

Am I missing something here? Does my last point make sense?
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