Book Image

Drupal 7 Multi Sites Configuration

Book Image

Drupal 7 Multi Sites Configuration

Overview of this book

Drupal is one of the most powerful PHP Content Management Systems there is. However, why would you install a CMS for every site you build? With just one copy of Drupal you can host several sites. Drupal has long had multi-site support, and Drupal 7's support is even better than previous versions. Drupal 7 Multi-Sites Configuration will teach you how to host several websites on a single copy of Drupal. You will learn how to create different sites, each with its own domain, content, and theme. This valuable information will help you to save time by managing modules and sharing them across several sites as well as administering your sites all in one place.This book will show you how to configure a system for multi-site, and then install several sites on one copy of Drupal, all with their own domain name and database. Learn how to install and share modules and themes, configure Apache, PHP, and MySQL for multi-site, and then manage the site. Once your site system is successfully set up, discover some of the advanced configurations possible with Drupal multi-site, as well as how to upgrade and maintain your sites.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Shared content


Shared authentication is a popular but tricky problem to solve. Another often-requested feature for multi-site installations is sharing content.

The multi-site design was not initially intended to share content. In fact, it was intended to not share content. Be that as it may, there are a few ways of accomplishing this.

As with shared authentication, one possibility is to attempt to share database tables between different sites on a multi-site. On occasion, users report having attempted this method on their own sites. But this method is also fraught with difficulties. Security is difficult, updates require special care, and there is constant danger of what is called a "race condition", where two different sites vie for control of the same resource. Consequently, this method should be avoided.

There are a few other more reliable methods, though.

Sharing content with Services and Deploy

The Services module (http://drupal.org/project/services) discussed in the previous section...