Multi-Site Setup

[Melvin Suter]

Hi there

I have a general question:

I've got some sites running for my personal use (portfolio/projects, recordings of me playing an instrument, etc.) and I'm currently in the process of recreating them. (They are old and don't look that good.)
Generally I use about the same style for all my websites. Should I still create a separate installation for each site or would you create one big installation for all sites and create pages for each "topic"?

Option 1:
- A ProcessWire Installation on example.com
- Pages on example.com/projects and example.com/music
- example2.com and example3.com are aliases for example.com and with a module (tried it, should be possible) or htaccess-rewrite redirect example2.com to example.com/projects and so on

Pro/Con:
+ Changes in my core-setup and modules will be active on all sites
+ Styles and style-fixes are kept clean and equal on all sites
- Organisation can be chaotic with that amount of pages/templates/fields
- Page might become slow with that amount of elements?

Option 2:
- example2.com and example3.com have each their own ProcessWire Installation seperated from each other

Pro/Con:
The upper in reverse

What would you do? Any tipps?

Thanks & Regards, Melvin

[OrganizedFellow]

Are you new to ProcessWire?

If so, then I might recommend you keep it all under one. Why?

This will give you the opportunity to learn much more. They will use the same styling? Same layout? This will make it easier by using just a few templates.

Is there something you wish to make only visible to you versus visible to guests? You'll learn about roles and permissions. This way you can tailor content to be visible to your visitors and yourself when you are logged in.

Your first PW backend will be chaotic with too many pages and templates and fields. It's the natural order of things ? Over time, you will learn how to organize your backend in a fashion that makes better sense to you. I find it easier to keep all that under ONE website instead of trying to duplicate one to the other. Once you understand how to better organized things, it will make more sense and you can apply that logic to your second, better organized site.

ALSO, try and do as much as you can without the use of Modules. There are many many wonderful modules created by the community that solves a lot of problems and wishes. I have found PW to be quite powerful enough without them until truly needed.

[dragan]

If the design is almost the same across sites, I wonder why you want to spread your content across several domains in the first place?

Is it for legacy reasons? You could define one main domain for the future, and on relaunch simply use 301 redirects.

But if you want to keep separate domains, I'd try option 1, except...

8 hours ago, Melvin Suter said:

example2.com and example3.com are aliases for example.com and with a module (tried it, should be possible) or htaccess-rewrite redirect example2.com to example.com/projects and so on

I wouldn't recommend that step. You could run into problems with search engines who detect duplicated content across several URLs.