Textpattern CMS

#1 2010-10-12 23:26:05

maruchan

Member

From: Ukiah, California

Registered: 2010-06-12

Posts: 596

Website

How to choose between multi-site and separate installs?

I’m doing a website for a non-profit organization with a bunch of sub-organizations under it, like this:

                    _______________________________________
                   |                                       |
                   |    Parent Organization                |
                   |                                       |
                   |_______________________________________|
                         ||             |                 ||||
                       ||                ||                   ||||
   ___________________________    ________________________    ________________
  |                           |  |                        |  |                |
  |  Sub-org 1, same layout   |  | Sub-org 2, same...     |  | External org   |
  |___________________________|  |________________________|  |________________|

So, most sub-organizations will have the same graphics and layout (including the parent), appearing just like separate pages of the site. Except I’d like them to have separate capabilities with regards to how the admin section looks, and which plugins will be used, in case they come back to me later and say, “oh, our sub-org wants custom X, Y, and Z.” (“External org” is using its own website already, so that’s just a link to their site)

How would I decide between multi-site and separate installs? I’d like to avoid separate installs, but I couldn’t find anywhere how multi-site worked with plugins, etc. — does multi-site just use completely different databases for each site? So it’s just the core txp files that are not duplicated? What about images and files that users upload?

Any tips would be appreciated. I would normally do this in Joomla but I’d like to explore the Textpattern option too.

#2 2010-10-12 23:59:31

jsoo

Plugin Author

From: NC, USA

Registered: 2004-11-15

Posts: 1,793

Website

Re: How to choose between multi-site and separate installs?

In Txp multisite the only shared element is the textpattern core (system files). Each site has its own database, images, plugins, etc.

I suppose you could do a multisite installation in which each site uses the same database, each with its own table prefix. Then you could hack up some commonality by making direct calls to safe_query() using the desired table prefix. NB I haven’t tried this, nor even given it much thought …

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