Multi-site Longterm Support

[kater]

Hi forum,

Thanks for PW and to all people making it so great!

I'm planning a multilanguage "multi-site" which will will double as project-archive for an cultural institution. So i expect it will run many years with only crucial core updates (and changing admins). So i will try to keep it as 3. party module-independent as possible. Also, i'd stick with PW commercial modules procache, listerpro and proforms to maintain the most simple and reliable update route possible.

However, not having done this in PW yet, i have some questions.

www.basesite.com (Portal-like frontend)

- all-projects (300+)

- all-news / press releases

- links to institutions (incl. Institution1 and a couple others)

- information pages

www.institution1.com

- specific projects (pulled from all-projects)

- specific news (pulled from all-news / press releases)

- information pages

- a couple contact forms, ...

Information Systems

- feed to some Information screens from all-projects, most likely rss. no details yet.

Projects and news will be maintained through the Base-Site.

All multilanguage (2-3) frontends will be largely independent layouts.

My questions:

1) Is the core-packaged multisite module considered a longterm solution supported by PW or is there something on the roadmap which may require changes to the API?

2) Will said modules / plugins support multilanguage / multisite in above scenario?

3) Anyone had a similar project and ran into problems i might consider?

thanks and cheers!

[teppo]

1) There are no plans to drop support for it, if that's what you're asking -- so yes, it can be considered a longterm solution.

On the other hand, you might consider that with ProcessWire you don't really have to upgrade your site every time a new release comes out, so in that sense it wouldn't even matter that much if specific core feature was, at some future point, superseded by something different. ProcessWire isn't like some other systems, where just about every upgrade is essentially a security fix -- so far there have been no vulnerabilities in the core code, and we intend to keep things like that.

There's also one potential gotcha here: what you're describing above kind of sounds like you'd benefit more from the Multisite module instead of the core multisite support.

With core multisite support all your sites share common core code, but have their own templates, site-specific modules and databases. Essentially they're separate sites with some shared codebase. That's important when/if you, for an example, need to re-use data from one site to another. With Multisite module there's one base site, and all other sites live in the same page tree but can be accessed with their own domains. By default they share same templates, modules, etc. in addition to the core code, and can also use content from each other (or the base site) easily.

Note: multisite module sharing same templates doesn't mean that you can't customise templates per site. The workflow is just a bit different.

It's also important to consider when it comes to managing said sites. Multisite module makes it easy to manage all sites from one place (i.e. the "subsites" are just branches in the main sites page tree), while with the core multisite support they're separate sites, with their own user accounts, admin views, etc. If your sites are going to be managed by different people anyway, this probably isn't much of a benefit, so it does really depend on your use case

2) If you're referring to the commercial modules mentioned above, that depends on how you use them in your setup, and there might be some limitations.

You might want to check this out first by contacting the module author (Ryan) directly. I'm not entirely certain on the details at the moment, and wouldn't want to spread any misinformation here

3) Yes and no -- not exactly identical, but we've built a few multisite setups.

The biggest issue has usually been the management part, i.e. how it should be handled in the first place, what happens when later on the client decides that each site does indeed require specific permissions, etc. Most of that is now much easier than it was just a few years ago. Permission management, for an example; modules like UserGroups and Dynamic Roles have made a huge impact in this area.

Hope this helps a bit!

[kater]

Thanks for your reply!

Yes, I'm leaning towards the multisite module since i want to share a database (all projects and news).