Hello, and a multi-site question

[Russell]

Hi All,

I've been investigating Processwire for a week or so as my new CMS for some new websites I'm setting up. I've used ultiple CMS's in the past and never been 100% happy with any of them. Wordpress is too "bloggy", Drupal is too complicated, E107 I can't remember why I wasn't enthused by it. I have a couple of Zencart sites, but they're e-commerce specific, so am sticking with those, but for my new sites, I want something that I can make how I want, without going through days of confusing configuration, or following a rabbit warren of code calls to track down how to change something, then have issues every time I want to update the core system.

I am also a programmer, but not a web designer. I can figure just about everything out, but I don't have the time to dedicate my life to just figuring those things out. So, I want something simple, but easily customisable, and I want something I can can skin relatively easily without have to be a CSS guru. Processwire seems to cover the first two, but lacks in the last criteria. Some ready made, plugable skins would be nice, but I understand the Processwire philosophy and why that isn't here as yet. I'm willing to overlook that for now, and just resign myself to having to learn web design, if it means I can do everything else without having to have a hundred page manual and decipher everyone else's convoluted PHP code.

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OK, given that premise, here is what I want to do. I am setting up several gaming sites that are all related to the one game, but each site will cover a different area of interest within the game. There will be one overall wrapper site, which has some of it's own content, but is also a portal into the other 3 sites, pulling recent content and displaying, and then linking into the sub-site sections. The other three sites are basically independent, although may reference one another's info occasionally.

The skins on all sites could be different, possibly with the same header navigation though. It would be nice to share user databases between them, but given that there may only be one or two with user generated content, or possibly even none, I  might be able to forgo the common user base, as I think this is the biggest issue I could come across.

So, data sharing between sites, nice to have single user base, but not 100% essential, and least repetition of core CMS so upgrades etc are as easy as possible. Does this sound doable in PW, without heaps of manual coding and work-arounds? I saw the Multisite module, but I don't think it would be suitable due to the independent nature of the sub-sites being accessible from both their own domain, plus sub-domains of the main site. I did see a post from Ryan somewhere about sharing data between the sites via RSS, but I'm not sure how easy this is, and whether it is a crutch solution, or viable for long-term large data sharing. I also don't know what I don't know at this stage, as I have done some local installs of PW and played around with the basic profile, but that's it, and my sites still have to be designed.

With all that, what comments would people have on issues and options for implementing this through Processwire. Does PW sound like a good option to get me to where I want to be?

Thanks.

Russell.

[Macrura]

I want something I can can skin relatively easily without have to be a CSS guru.

i guess if you are not wanting to do all of the design work from scratch, you could start with a template, or a framework; If you can find something on Themeforest that covers a decent percent of what you need, you might save yourself some markup/css time..

[Russell]

OK, so it's just a case of grabbing a html/css template from somewhere, and then adding in the PW data as needed? Coming from other CMS's where I've usually just used some of their themes, I'm not sure whether vanilla html/css will fit in? I understand I still have to put all the PW API calls in to put the data I want, where I want, but I guess it's just getting a layout I can start with, without having to write all the css from scratch, that I need pointers for.

[Macrura]

you start with a html file and add any calls to the api as necessary; from 0 and up.

for example to get your stylesheets and js you would do

<?php echo $config->urls->templates?>style.css (if your style.css was in the root of the templates folder..)

most of what you initially need to know is all there in the default profile.

[Russell]

I guess it's probably just a matter of ying and see on the design side.

My bigger problem is sharing data between the sites, if they are not linked internally. I'll try and find the RSS comments againand see if that leads me to what I need.

Thanks for the comments.

[pogidude]

From what I understand, you want to have 3 independent websites (4 if you count the umbrella site) while being able to *pull* content from the sites, yeah?

Then, I think the built-in multisite support feature should work well enough for you http://processwire.com/api/modules/multi-site-support/ this is option #1 in that page. And no, you don't need to download the Multisite module unless you want to go the option 2 route. So, what you'll be able to have multiple sites use only one set of core files so a core upgrade would upgrade all your sites.

RSS - I don't think sharing content/data via rss is a crutch solution since that's how a lot of sites share their content. It's a sort of api to the sites content when you think about it. Of course if you really want to go all nuts about it, you could probably build an api on each of your websites so you could do something like this:

http://sub.gaming.com/api/posts/now - and have this return data in json or xml format

but if all you want to do is to pull recent articles from each of the subdomains then I think serving via rss will get you there and it has the added benefit of being able to serve your users who want to read your content via rss as well

[Russell]

Thanks for the reply.

I've thought some more about the RSS option and yes, you're probably right about it being usable for some of my needs. I also missed the option 1 multisite instructions. I'll look in detail and see if that helps. Probably the only thing missing is sharing the user data. I'm trying to decide how much of an issue that will be for me.

[pogidude]

Yup.. option 1 specifically points out the issue about user data sharing in the disadvantages section.

[adrian]

If you're wanting to share data between sites, check out the web services module: http://modules.processwire.com/modules/service-pages/

[Russell]

I haven't done anything with web services before, so I'll check it out. It just comes down again to finding the time to learn new technologies vs just throwing data in boxes.

Thanks.

[RyanJ]

Hi Russell, 

I am currently using option 1 for a multisite project and it is working out great and is fairly simple to set up. My only question that has arose recently is about the function ProcessWireHostSiteConfig() found in index.config.php. 

Is there a size limit for this functions array?  How many sites is too many?

 function ProcessWireHostSiteConfig() {
        return array(

                 'mydomain.com' => 'site-mydomain',
                 'www.mydomain.com' => 'site-mydomain',
                 'dev.mydomain.com' => 'site-dev',
                 'www.otherdomain.com' => 'site-other',

                 '*' => 'site',                );}

I too will soon be on he journey to search for different options on how to share data between sites. Thanks for the module recommendation adrian.