front and back-end web development, Leeds, UK
Richard's Blog - Design, coding and life in Japan
Making multi website systems
Submitted by Richard on Thu, 11/26/2009 - 11:33I have realized over time that I get asked to do similar things again and again. I have set up websites that are similar to others I have made in the past. Of course the know how and the code sitting there waiting to be re-used means I can do this again more simply and quickly than the first time around!!
So is this the way to do it............. NO!
Why not?
Because you still have 2 websites to maintain, when you maintain 1 and not the other even your code versions become out of sync. You should never settle on 2 systems when you can do it in 1.
My Solution(s)
Multi-website platform
in your current system think about from the beginning how could this app hold more websites doing the same thing with a different design. Mostly it will be down to data separation - a quick website id field will quickly deal with that! Along with templating which needs a little thought but is extremely simple. One system that took me months to build could have an additional website built in the space of days!
Off the shelf tools
I used to hate the idea of Wordpress and Drupal because they were just doing stuff that I could do myself using PHP or whatever. But now the dust has settled and I see how strong these products are, the communities, the upgrade paths, easy plugin/module creation. By just making a theme and module/modules you very quickly and easily have a very portable vehicle for your app. You now longer need to worry about server setup, file structures/paths and these guys can run on any server package out there, and you can let others worry about the bugs!
Some of the cms systems I am keen on are Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine and Radiant
Use an API to separate your application logic
Now with REST and other technologies being so simple to build into a web framework you can create a single template and rest interpreter module/plugin for your off the shelf cms to let your app do all of the processor crunching behind an API, whilst letting your front end out into the wild where it can grow and multiply in the comfortable self contained structure of a versioned module or plugin.
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