Mobile and Multi Site Best Practices

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Hi all,

I'm just testing the water with these questions to see if there is value in either a blog post or white paper that I could write.

Multi-site:

I use a single core instance of concrete5 to host a number of domains on the same server. I run this on a LAMP machine in the cloud. It may not be "best practice" but I'm happy to contribute the approach as a strawman to get other discussing its merits and better the approach.

I recall a few asking about this a while back so please let me know and I'll write something up.

Mobile sites:

Of course, mobile is hot and mobile variants of sites are important. Again, relating to the above multi-site setup, I've leveraged that to setup a m.<domain>.com subdomain of the main desktop site and auto switch between. The great thing about this is that the editors manage all through the desktop editorial interface and the mobile site just displays different things, differently in a more optimised way depending on device.

Again, happy to contribute my approach as a strawman here so let me know.

Kind regards and happy holidays,

Dan

dbaggs
 
12345j replied on at Permalink Reply
12345j
There is an add-on to do he multiple domain setup and andrew wrote something about moole, but it's always good to hear different viewpoints. If you do decide to write it up you should submit it here.http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/
Mnkras replied on at Permalink Reply
Mnkras
personally, i would comment out the base_url and dir_rel, then use on_start, check the requested domain(if BASE_URL = m.blah.com) and set the theme
dbaggs replied on at Permalink Reply
dbaggs
Ok then, so I just got off my backside and finally made the effort to write a couple of articles to hopefully invigorate a bit more discussion in this area.

As suggested, I've submitted them to the How To section also.

FYI - Here they are:

http://dannybaggs.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/a-multi-site-approach-in...

and

http://dannybaggs.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/a-mobile-approach-in-con...

Kind regards,

Dan
alvarezcyberx replied on at Permalink Reply
How does your method compare to the domain mapper add-on? Does anyone know if either of these methods allow for a true multi domain concrete5 ? For example, concrete5 lets you upload an icon for the site, but only allows one icon to be uploaded, so how would you be able to get multiple icons working(1 for each domain, etc.)?
dbaggs replied on at Permalink Reply
dbaggs
Hi, sorry for the late reply.

If I was completely honest, I'd have to say that I wasn't aware of the domain mapper add-on until you mentioned it.

Upon reading into it, it would appear that the domain mapper differs by the fact that it shares the running instance across domains which allows you to share users, permissions, etc. which sounds very useful in some cases.

The approach I proposed for multi-site doesn't do that and is a lot more basic in the sense that it re-uses the concrete core files only between domains and that's pretty much it. No rocket science and perhaps just pointing out the obvious. Therefore, each domain will have its own database and therefore you can have your two different icons. I would argue that both have their merits depending on what you are after.

With regards to the mobile proposal, the mobile domain shares the core files and the database (shared content, users, permissions etc.) but all "view" files are customised for mobile delivery. In addition, I create a symbollic link between the files of the mobile domain and the normal desktop domain but deliver files like images with the use of the image helper and device attributes as input for optimisation reasons.


Hope that helps answer your question.

Regards,

Dan