Drupal for Multi-site hosting
We’re starting to do a lot of Drupal hosting for various projects around here. It looks like we’ll be having about a dozen or so Drupal-powered sites running by summer.
I’d been planning on putting together a “Learning Commons Drupal Distro” that had all of the modules that we like, and themes, etc. so I could easily set up new sites without re-downloading each module repeatedly. I was even planning on writing an install script, which would copy stuff into a specified directory and prompt for easy configuration. Turns out I won’t have to do that…
Patrick just asked me to walk through the process of setting up a new custom Drupal theme, and I mentioned my plan. He looked at me like I was saying something really lame (it happens more often that I’d like), and then he asked why I wouldn’t just use the concept of “sites” within Drupal to host them all from one installation.
Duh.
So, you can manage as many separate sites as you like, from one directory of deployed files. Just by adding a domain-specific configuration folder/file. Each site can use a separate database, or share a database with a custom table prefix. You can even have site-specific themes and modules, apparently.
And any updates to Drupal get instantly inherited by all sites. Why on earth didn’t I latch onto this in the first place? It’s SOOO much better than what I was planning, and makes Drupal even slicker for what we’re doing. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyeballs really help to point out the obvious…
Nice … I like that idea. we’ve also been using Drupal for a lot of stuff. we just released the new intranet/blog/project tracking/communication site in my new organization and people seem very happy. The thing we were worried about were people wanting seperate instances for all sorts of reasons and then having to maintain them all. Yikes. This approach is worth investigating for us here at PSU.
One other question … what do your readers know about Zope/Plone? We are looking to use it for a set of large enterprise tools in the eLearning space. I’d love some thoughts.
[...] Cole’s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale. [...]
I’m curious, too. Promoted this to Post status to see if we can harness the untold power of The Lazyweb…
See http://www.zope.com/products/zope4edu.html. Zope Corp. did a project for Duke University and this was the outcome, as I understand it. Chronicle of Higher Ed. and other universities appear to be customers too.
I dabbled with Zope/Plone and just ended up scratching my head more often than not. That might be a reflection of my own inadequacy and lack of fellow users to ask questions of though. The Zope and Plone lists tend to be copious but full of technical postings that require you already “get it.”
I also had a long time user tell me that ancillary products tend to stay in development for a very long time, or that breakage with backwards compatibility had burned them several times.
This is probably unfair of me though. David Wiley has used Zope/Plone for some projects (http://cosl.usu.edu/) as I recall, as does the learning object repository out of Rice – http://cnx.rice.edu/.
HTH
David
oh, and I use a separate domain name for each instance, and configure Apache to point them all at the same directory. For sites that don’t have domains yet, I start by modifying the /etc/hosts file on my desktop to resolve to my server.
@Gary – sure did, and it’s worked pretty well so far. I’ve documented the exact project-specific steps at
http://wiki.ucalgary.ca/page/LearningCommons/Documentation/DrupalHosting
Have you actually done multi sites with one codebase Drupal yet? I know that various pieces of documentation say it can be done, but there are sure a lot of posts of people trying to do it.
If so, how did you actually implement it? Right now, I am experimenting with a separate domain name for each site, which Apache Virtual Host entries pass on to the various sites defined in the sites folder of Drupal.
so, here i am searching for “drupal multi-site”, and who comes up as the third result!? anyhow, i will continue to harvest drupal knowledge from your brain… this time in blog format. in the meantime, have a great holiday…