I have a customer with a primary site and multiple micro-sites. These sites have a lot of redundant information in them, like blocks and pages about the company or contact information.

My customer would like to be able to edit the common content once but be able to add unique pages, menus, views, themes, etc.. to each micro-site. I'm looking at the Domain Access module and it looks like it does everything my customer wants. I can't test it on my current hosting provider and my estimate will lock us into a final price.

Does anyone have experience with this module? Will it do the subset of shared nodes? Any gotcha's I should know about?

I'm looking at using Drupal 6 and MySQL btw.

Thanks. -Don-

lol, thanks Shai. You bring up a good point with the issues.

My formula for estimates (since all programmers are optimists) is raise the units one and multiply by .5. So 2 weeks becomes 1 month, 2 months becomes 1 quarter, etc.. It actually works for me.

-Don-

On 10/7/2010 4:26 PM, Shai Gluskin wrote:

Hi Don,

I think your big gotcha here is the fixed price.

I don't have experience with Domain Access. But I would assume problems. Not because it's a bad module. It looks extremely well supported. But its complicated. 1400+ issues in the queue. And it sounds like you'll be working on someone else's server... and the implementation looks like it will certainly involve fussing with some server settings.

I would make your best guess on how much time it would take you... then multiply that by 10 for the estimate. Then offer the client "time and materials" as an alternative to your fixed price.

I know you were looking for someone who had actually used the module to respond... but I couldn't stop myself :)

Shai

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Don <donald@fane.com mailto:donald@fane.com> wrote:

 I have a customer with a primary site and multiple micro-sites. These
sites have a lot of redundant information in them, like blocks and
pages
about the company or contact information.

My customer would like to be able to edit the common content once
but be
able to add unique pages, menus, views, themes, etc.. to each
micro-site.
I'm looking at the Domain Access module and it looks like it does
everything my customer wants. I can't test it on my current hosting
provider and my estimate will lock us into a final price.

Does anyone have experience with this module? Will it do the subset of
shared nodes? Any gotcha's I should know about?

I'm looking at using Drupal 6 and MySQL btw.

Thanks.
-Don-

--
[ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

+1 For the problem of other modules not playing nicely with DA. My own example: twitter, when it posts the url of new content, does not seem to respect the originating domain of the post. Instead all links in the tweet point to the primary domain. Which is a problem if the post is not published there.

-Generally- though, I find these problems are surmountable. And they are not problems with DA but with other modules not following best practices. Unfortunately, it's impossible to see ahead to anticipate these problems for spec'ing. So definitely pad your estimate.

Also, I recently was disappointed that I couldn't use my hot new varnish / pressflow deployment with DA. DA is not compatible with aggressive or external caching, as noted on the performance page.

On 10/07/2010 05:44 PM, Pablo L. de Miranda wrote:

Hi Don, I have been working with Domain Access a year now. For your needs it will work very well, the primary problem is that another modules are not build with multiples domain in mind. One example is the contact module, you will have a unique contact shared in all your site, I`m modifing the contact core module to support Domain Access, but it wasn't approved yet as a new project. The module is very easy to use, no hard-code configurations are necessary, all the job are point a new domain to your drupal instalation and configure the Domain Access to receive the request coming for this domain and the magic happens. .

Att,

Pablo Lacerda de Miranda Software Engineerer Ci&T - Campinas pablolmiranda@gmail.com +55 11 8701-1086

Thanks for all the help. I've been wanting to set up a multi-site installation, I've decided to go ahead and try it out.

-Don-

On 10/8/2010 1:16 PM, Pablo L. de Miranda wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 7:59 PM, Christopher M. Jones cjones@partialflow.com wrote:

...

+1 For the problem of other modules not playing nicely with DA. My own example: twitter, when it posts the url of new content, does not seem to respect the originating domain of the post. Instead all links in the tweet point to the primary domain. Which is a problem if the post is not published there.

Almost all modules, exception these that work with DA, use the site_name variable. With DA you must use the global php variable $_domain to get informations about the domain in use.

...

-Generally- though, I find these problems are surmountable. And they are not problems with DA but with other modules not following best practices. Unfortunately, it's impossible to see ahead to anticipate these problems for spec'ing. So definitely pad your estimate. Also, I recently was disappointed that I couldn't use my hot new varnish / pressflow deployment with DA. DA is not compatible with aggressive or external caching, as noted on the performance page.

If a group start to migrate or to add support in others modules for DA, this will be a new paradigm on Drupal adoption. DA has a great potencial, but a community support is need..

Att,

Pablo Lacerda de Miranda Engenheiro de Software Ci&T - Campinas pablolmiranda@gmail.com +55 11 8701-1086